What is Experience Design?
A good Experience Designer mainly focuses on the users needs, feelings, mindsets, and contexts when designing a product. Building a relationship with users and using those insights before starting prototyping is the key.
Introduction
For a brief Introduction. The goal of this project was to work on the building Upham Hall, and to find more useful ways to utilize the space there is now. This was a group project where I collaborated with 4 others to create a prototype. All of my fellow group members were college students just like me. This assignment was a very user centered project and required a lot of interaction with people from our user groups and other people we knew.
Client
Miami University (Upham Hall)
Year
08-20-23
What is Upham Hall?
For a little background information, Upham Hall is one of Miami Universities older buildings with construction being finished in 1965. It currently holds many different majors including Anthropology, Criminal Justice, Statistics, and much more. The current state of Upham is not the best for students who spend a lot of time in this building and is not very accommodating. The students who like to spend their time in between classes don’t have anywhere to sit and do work so they have to resort to sitting on one of the benches in the middle of the hallways. This is the main issue we wanted to solve, helping students have a comfortable place to be able to do homework is an important part of having a good learning envor
Our research began with taking a look at some of the other buildings on Miami’s campus and how they accommodate students who have majors there or spend lots of time in that building. On the left you can see an image of The Farmers School of Business, in this building there is lots of open seating and available spaces for students to sit and work. We took a look at other buildings on campus too such as the new Clinical Health Sciences Building and Laws Hall as seen in the pictures below. We did lots of comparison with other areas on campus to get an idea of what the ideal Upham Hall would look like.
How Might We Statement
How might we turn Upham Hall into a more welcoming building for students to collaborate with each other and get work done?
Key Takeaways from Research
1
Upham hall has lots of rooms that were unused and left empty during the semester. There was also sub rooms that were rarely being used
2
Students are unlikely to enter a room that is closed and has its lights off, because they are unsure if they are in use.
3
Students who do have to stay in the building during the day most likely will stay in the halls or leave and go somewhere else to work.
We took all of our ideas and put them together to create imaginary personas that would represent our entire user group. This helped us be able to keep the user’s interests the main focus of our project.
Ethnographic Video
In the middle of this assignment, we were tasked with creating a video that tells the story of our persona and their current issues. We decided to pick the persona of George who is a student who has a major in the building and spends lots of time there.
Prototype / Usability Testing
This is one of the flows of our initial prototype. It shows how users can access any floor of the building and get a list of available rooms for that time.
Usability Testing Steps
Tasks
During our Usability testing, we gave our testers a set of tasks including finding certain rooms and locating the QR code that will access that app, we then used these results to refine our prototype design
Questions
After completing the tasks, we would ask our testers a series of questions including, are you confident in your choice of a study room, or would you be willing to use this software again in the future. We would analyze these answers afterwards.
Findings
There were quite a few things we discovered during our Usability Testing, first, we discovered that students are not willing to walk into any random room with its lights off and door shut, even if it is supposed to be available at the time. We also discovered students need lots of seating and open lighting and outlets to have a good study space.
After our Usability Testing, we decided we needed to make some changes to our prototype. On our main page we added a color coded system that shows users if there is availability on that floor from the main page. We also decided we should add a more descriptive page for each room that shows capacity, and what type of amenities it has.
This project has taught me a lot over the course of the semester. I learned a lot more about stepping into the world of User Experience and creating designs based off of certain personas. I learned new tactics for gaining research and testing things with different users so that you can make the best changes that focuses on the user. I think in the future I will benefit a lot by using these techniques when designing and prototyping ideas.