Session abstract
What you’ll learn
The Indio Mountains Research Station (IMRS) is over 40,000 acres of pristine Chihuahuan Desert managed by the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The IMRS Biodiversity Explorer is a data-heavy research tool built for students, researchers, and community members alike, integrating iNaturalist observation data, local species data, points of interest on a map, and five years of local historical weather records. It serves three wildly different audiences on a single interface: researchers who speak in taxonomy, students preparing for their first field biology trip, and curious hikers who just want to know what that bird was. The challenge was designing for an ecologist and a casual nature lover without dumbing it down for one or alienating the other. The answer came from my decade in ecology and teaching. In this talk, I'll walk through how domain expertise shaped real technical decisions such as progressive disclosure patterns, dual-mode data views, scientific data modeling, and the architecture choices behind a TanStack app built to serve a genuinely diverse user base. You will leave with a framework for treating user expertise as a design catalyst, and a new appreciation for what non-traditional backgrounds bring to a codebase.