Minimally useful app fails to meet users in the field – Digital Atlas of Ancient Life Review

I second all opinions shared in françois-marie arouet's thorough review. More than that, it's clear the authors never considered the mobile audience for this atlas. • The mobile audience is undeniably folks in the field who likely don't know what Period's rocks they're looking at in the first place — much less the phylum of the fossil in front of them. • The mobile audience is mostly folks looking at a possible fossil that is likely fragmentary or in a mode of preservation not represented in the Atlas's photos, which are instead presented in the minimally useful "single best specimen" manner of systematic paleontogical work. Speaking of the photos, why so tiny given the 100MB app size? • The mobile audience wants to know something about the animal, not just a species name and a stratigraphic account. Not even a minimal paleobiological or paleoecological account is provided. • The mobile audience knows one thing for sure: their exact geographic location. But the app fails to leverage GPS to help guide the user, and the locality maps are surprisingly incomplete, not showing any of the available formation-by-formation detail for geologic maps of these regions. The existence of this app is clearly due to "app" being used as a buzzword in the author's' NSF grant. There is very little usefulness in what could have been an exciting and engaging app. Authors outside the scientific establishment could do a much better job, and hopefully some will. Moral of the story: Science is like sex — it's too important to be left to the professionals.
Review by Hemiarges on Digital Atlas of Ancient Life.