In Summer 2023, I took CS 3750: User Interface Design, a human-computer interaction class focusing on creating intentional applications with the double diamond method, data-driven insights, and D2C consideration.

User Research, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Persona Mapping, Wireframing, Usability Testing

ROLE

TIMELINE

TEAM

TOOLS

User Experience Researcher, User Interface Designer

6 weeks (Jun. 2023 - Jul. 2023)

Zhisen An, Luke Eckenrod, Jonathan Turner

Figma, Illustrator

OVERVIEW

My Contributions

  1. Conducted extensive user research on target demographic and applied findings to ideation sketches via Figma

  2. Performed competitive analysis on alternative products, identifying our application’s niche in the market

  3. Built and iterated interactive prototype using data and insights from user interviews

Problem

People who are unfamiliar with Georgia Tech’s campus, particularly new students and visitors, lack quality resources that can navigate the interior of campus buildings. It can be difficult to find a specific room, functional printer, or gender-neutral bathroom amidst the maze of hallways and doors in unfamiliar buildings.

USER RESEARCH

Involved Parties

Three main groups would benefit from better indoor navigation resources. I included a variety of participants who fit within one of the three categories to ensure I addressed all of the most common pain points.

STUDENTS

new students, grad students, upperclassmen

FACULTY & STAFF

professors, administrative staff, janitors, researchers

VISITORS

parents, prospective students, guests

Insights

After analyzing over 40 survey responses and 10 user interviews, three general problems surfaced:

Several insights emerged from our research, which made it clear what problems we needed to address in our product.

  • Many students, faculty, and guests found locating the specific building easy using their preferred navigation app, but they struggled to locate specific rooms once inside. This was especially true for some buildings with more confusing layouts.

  • Directional signage inside buildings is sometimes misleading or outdated (e.g. arrows pointing ambiguously).

  • Visitors found the campus confusing to navigate because of a lack of updated visitor-friendly maps and resources.

  • Students and faculty found that amenities such as printers, restrooms, and water fountains are not well-marked and difficult to locate.

  • Frequent construction projects on campus block common footpaths, causing students, faculty, and visitors to waste time trying to navigate campus.

Competitive Analysis

To better understand what our application required to succeed, I analyzed alternative solutions that participants indicated in their responses. The most common resource was Apple Maps and Google Maps, which are grouped for having the same use cases. Conveniently, students, faculty, and visitors most likely already have a navigation app installed on their mobile devices. The UI is familiar, and they clearly know how to use it. However, both applications struggle with directing users around the inside of campus buildings, so they must rely on signage that is sometimes outdated or nonexistent. Even worse, there is no information for finding bathrooms or printers inside buildings whatsoever.

The second most common resource was existing campus blueprints and student-compiled maps found online. Maps for the most frequented buildings are available online for anyone to access, but not all of them have room numbers or amenities labeled. Even worse, resources such as student-made printer maps are extremely outdated and often lead users astray.

Core Requirements

  1. Directs the user to a specific classroom

  2. Navigates a user to the closest facility or amenity on the way to their destination

  3. Reroutes user around an obstacle

  4. Accepts crowd-sourced reporting for obstacles on footpaths

DESIGN

Personas

Using the data collected from our research, I crafted three personas to capture the requirements of our users and their use cases.

REFLECTION

Takeaways

Considering this was the first project where I conducted extensive user research and went through the double diamond process, I learned a lot about immersing myself in the user’s shoes to flesh out the project design and requirements. I gained experience in interviewing users, figuring out small details like when to follow up on questions, how much time to allot them to think, and why it is important to craft meaningful, non-leading questions. I felt what it was like to come up with over a hundred solutions to our broad transportation issue, sort them into several groups, and narrow them down to the best idea. Ideating is not usually my strong suit, but practicing through this project has made the process much more enjoyable. Since listening to user feedback was of the utmost importance, I learned to maintain an open mind to ensure I wouldn't become attached to a particular idea. Overall, I was shocked at how much my team and I could accomplish in a short amount of time, and I found that I enjoyed conducting user research very much.

Next Steps

Besides working with developers to bring the prototype to life, I think it would be beneficial to do another round of user testing to rate the effectiveness of our final design. Our project constraints and timeline only allowed us to do usability tests on the initial prototype, so it would be helpful to see whether the changes improved the in-app experience. We could also explore making this a website rather than a mobile app since some users, especially visitors, indicated it would be too high of a commitment to download an app specifically for navigating one college campus.

Original Prototype

The initial design was created as a proof of concept that we presented to users.

Click here to view the full original prototype. I created a gamified version of the app to identify whether users would be able to perform core functionalities of the app when prompted, such as searching for a location, adding a stop, and reporting an obstruction.

Usability Testing

Three users tested our product. They were all visitors, specifically incoming freshmen attending FASET (freshman orientation). This drastically lowered the chance they were familiar with the campus and its surroundings, giving us a better idea of how effective the application is at providing clear and concise navigation without previous knowledge of campus’ layout. I closely followed behind the participant but made sure to tell them to use the app as if I wasn’t there and that I would only answer questions if absolutely necessary. 

This method, though simple, was effective at getting a detailed picture of how we could expect users to interact with the system. It also allowed us to make qualitative observations of mistakes and successes the user had. This can be more detailed and informative than numerical data, such as the amount of time it took. This method also yielded a more controlled experiment where outside environmental factors can be ruled out, negated, or blocked (e.g. making sure nobody interrupts the participant during the study).

We used the results of this test to iterate our design. Click here to view the full report.

Final Prototype

Interact with the final design below.