Seek by iNaturalist
Mobile App • Product Owner & Product Designer
Background
Seek by iNaturalist is a mobile app that uses real-time AR and on-device AI to identify species instantly, turning your surroundings into a living field guide. Initially launched in partnership with Netflix & WWF’s series Our Planet, Seek has since grown to 13M+ downloads and a 4.8⭐ rating.
Awards & Features
🎥 Featured in PBS’s Emmy-winning Climate California series (7:53)
📚 Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Honor from the American Library Association
📱 Featured in Apple’s iPhone Keynote
13M+
Downloads
4.8 ⭐
Rating
Featured in
Challenge
I was tasked with redesigning Seek from the ground up to accomplish a few goals:
Improve the AI ID experience to increase Seek’s App Store rating (3.2 ⭐)
Allow users to post to iNaturalist through Seek so even if AI can’t provide an ID, a real person can
Conduct research, design, and ship Seek in 6 months to align with external timelines
Role
As the Product Owner and sole Product Designer, I led Seek’s full redesign, creating a kid-friendly, gamified experience that blends exploration, learning, and conservation. My scope included UX, UI, branding, product strategy, and feature development.
I worked with a React Native Engineer, a CV/AI Engineer, a Dev/Ops Engineer, and our Stakeholder Engagement Strategist to ship Seek end-to-end.
Research
User goals
Learning: Get IDs for plants and animals they were seeing around them and answer the question “What am I seeing?”
Rewards: Earn badges for observing and collecting organisms
AI is frustrating when it’s a black box
From user research, it became apparent that the ID flow for Seek v1 was causing massive user frustration.
AI Identification felt like a black box, with a high percentage of partial success or failure.
Users felt they had no idea how to improve their identification, as there was no feedback mechanism to get better ID’s
The experience felt clunky, disjointed, and unsatisfying
Design Goals
Teach users to take better photos & get better IDs
Create a delightful, gamified ID experience
Even if Seek can’t provide an ID, lead the user to an alternative and satisfy the desire to learn
Provide more learning opportunities when a user gets an ID
Design solutions
Teach a user how improve AI results
Our CV Engineer was able to integrate our AI model into a live video feed – creating real-time in-camera suggestions. Since the user goal was to get organisms to species rank, we decided to gamify the camera with 7 ranks of taxonomy as a way to “fill up” the progress bar.
Our AI model is trained on labeled photos from iNaturalist → users learn to take better photos by finding angles that the AI can identify well → users learn how to take identifiable photos.
Double down on learning in the wonder moment
It’s an incredibly exciting experience when a user gets a species rank ID - it’s like unlocking a password. To take advantage of this, I added a new “species page” that is packed with all the information I could pull from iNaturalist to help a user learn right when they have the most enthusiasm. Part of this process was thinking about a younger version of me and wondering, what else would he be curious about after getting an ID?
Complete the learning loop even when Seek can’t identify to species
When Seek can only identify to Order, Family, or Genus, a section called “Species Nearby in this Taxon” appears, filtering Seek’s best guess by the user’s location, allowing the user to get an answer even if Seek can’t provide an ID!
When Seek can’t provide any ID, the user can post the observation to iNaturalist. This means our AI model will be trained on the organisms it previously couldn’t identify AND the user can get an ID from a real person in the iNaturalist community– a win-win!
Results
⭐ App Store rating jumped from 3.2 to 4.8
📈 13M+ downloads (2025), entirely organic
💚 Loved by educators, parents, and naturalists of all ages
Honestly, I designed Seek partially for my own 5-year-old self. The part of me who loved to look at nature guides before he could read. The part of me who would grab onto every piece of nature knowledge he could. So reading reviews that share how much it changed their life makes me feel so grateful and elated. Seek taught me all the plants I know– it changed my life too!
Lessons Learned
Seek taught me:
when designing for learning, follow your own curiosity
make it easy to learn how to get better AI outputs using gamification and immersive technology
gamifying the gateways to building empathy for nature makes understanding science more accessible and fun
Through this project, I learned how to own an end-to-end product vision and execute across creative, technical, and strategic domains, all while advocating for learning, making science more accessible, and working with complex tech like on-device AI. It deepened my passion for XR, gamified learning, and building tools that foster empathy for the natural world.