University of Michigan

Campus Navigation App

Class Project for SI 422:
Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation
What was the project: The University of Michigan wanted us to create campus navigation app to help students.
Project Team: 2 UX Researchers
My Role: Lead UX Designer
Duration: 8 weeks
Tools: Miro, Google Drive, Adobe Xd

Research Question:

"What are the biggest challenges that students face in getting around campus and finding what they are looking for?"

Solution:
The biggest challenges seem to be around navigating inside classroom buildings and finding entrances to buildings more than finding the building itself.

How can we answer this question?[Research]

Research

Interview Guide

Link to full Interview Guide
The first start to begin our research was taking the time to create an interview guide we wanted to make sure our questions allowed us to get the most useful data possible.
We first decided what type of Interview we wanted and we decided to do a Contextual Inquiry and ask students questions as they navigate places around campus that they have and have not been to.
The Interview Guide includes:
-Introduction
-Warm Up Question --> For example: To start off, how has your semester been going so far?
-General Issue Question --> For example: Have you ever had a super useful resource for navigating around campus?
-Deep Focus Question --> For example: What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced navigating around campus?
-Retrospective --> For example: Assuming they pull up one of these apps: What made you decide to pull up (Google, Maps/MBus Tracking, Waze, Apple Maps)?
-Wrap Up

Research

User Interviews

We interviewed 4 students and recorded and transcribed the interviews.
Then we took the time to code our interviews by highlighting any useful information for helping us answer the research question.
Here are some examples of the codes, the transcripts of the interviews are confidential but I am more than happy to share the rest of the codes if you would like.

Research

Affinity Mapping

We then took all the codes we created to create an Affinity Diagram in Miro
Key Findings:
-Students often find it hard to locate rooms inside buildings
-Most students walk around campus
-Students often get frustrated trying to find the entrance of buildings.
-Students uses buildings they know to get to other buildings
-Students find trying to navigate the buses on campus are difficult
-Google Maps is the app of choice for most students.

Research

Survey Design

After we got the data from our interviews and affinity map we took the time create a survey to help us confirm any findings and get more insight to what we learned from our interviews.
Here is a link to the survey if you would like to check it out.
We got data from 15 participates and we created two diagrams to showcase our data.
A big detail we wanted to confirm was whether people really struggled to navigate inside buildings. Unlike navigating around campus where over 40 percent of students stated they felt a comfort level of 4 or 5 with resources it seems less than 30 percent of students rated a a comfort level of 4 or 5 in regards to navigating inside buildings.  

Another finding was relating to what apps do students use the most to navigate campus. In our interviews it was a mix of
google/apple but it seems overwhelmingly 88 percent of students use google maps.

Using this data we wanted to build our app with the focus of helping students inside buildings and using google maps as reference to see what would be good to implement in our own app.

What did we learn about typical students?

Research

Persona

Using all this data we were able to create the typical student James William. James brought our data to life and we could see how this app idea could be applicable to students.

Research

Journey Map

Using Adobe Xd I took the time to create a typical students journey map to also show the journey of a typical student using our data.

Research

Final Findings

So now with all this data what did we learn the app needs and what truly are the biggest challenges students face?
-Typical students find taking the bus very difficult
-They use google maps to find a majority of buildings on campus
-They often get lost trying to find the entrance of buildings
-A good chunk of students find it more challenging to find a classroom than find a building

Reflect and Grow

Reflect and Grow

Reflect

This was only a class project but I was able to learn so much about the research process pertaining to User Experience. I think since this was my first time doing any of these research methods there is a lot I could improve. If I could go back I would change how we analyzed the data. I felt since we had to do this for class the boundaries were quite limited but overall I am happy with the process and outcome of the project.

Reflect and Grow

Growth

Although not required, I decided to take the project a step further and actually create some mock ups and sketches for how I think this data could potentially be used.
Currently U of M has an app called University of Michigan:
This is the original and I decided to think of a way where we could easily build in what we learned. I feel with more time and resources there could be a lot that could be improved including adding the floors, adding an interactive map where students can input their classes, etc.‍

Original

New Feature

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Made With ❤️ & ☕️ by Sein Kim