Enhancing Nature Engagement through Mobile Applications: A Technological Approach

In the recent surge of digitalization, especially in the post-COVID-19 era, people increasingly rely on technology to make their lives more efficient and reliable. While nature offers numerous benefits to humans, nature is often overlooked due to busy lifestyles. As time passes, people who are busy with their economic lifestyles often do not have time to even learn the names of the flora around them. Technology plays a crucial role in how humans interact with nature. By developing an application that could ease gardening and creating a nature-aware community around us, it can encourage people to interact more with nature. Existing nature applications are underused due to poor accessibility and difficult-to-navigate user interfaces. Moreover, none of the existing applications provide insights into plants based on Malaysia’s regional and cultural relevance. The purpose of this project is to develop a nature interaction application that emphasizes human-computer interaction principles to enhance navigation for users. The application aims to offer insights into Malaysian flora to provide a localized experience, with Bahasa Malaysia included to increase accessibility for Malaysians. The application also acts as a one-stop shop for gardening tools, which eases human interaction with nature. All these features are made together with offering accessibility as a focus. The completed application was tested to evaluate its efficiency and user-friendliness. To fulfill this purpose, various studies about accessibility, user interface, and experience were made. The application named Nature Connect was developed using the React Ionic framework and backend processes using Python, TensorFlow, and Flask and using plugins such as Google Maps API and Capacitor. The developed application was then evaluated using usability testing metrics of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction to ensure its user-friendliness. The results were 96.4% in terms of effectiveness, 51 seconds per task on efficiency, and 66% on satisfaction. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2025-09-02-022 Full Text: PDF