Campus Wayfinding App User Research
UM would like to create a campus wayfinding app to help students.
Research Question: What are the biggest challenges that students face in finding what they need (e.g., classes, services, food) on campus?
Project Type
User experience research for SI 422, Usability Needs and Evaluation
Role
UX Researcher
Duration
February 2023 - March 2023
Design Tools
Figma
Conducting User Interviews and Analyzing Interview Data
Developing User Personas
Research Methods
Interviews
Survey
Journey Mapping
Personas
Task Analysis Diagramming
Team
Basil Chen and Humaira Hamid
Research Process
Upon identifying our research questions and creating our interview script and protocol, my team and I conducted user interviews on first and second year students to identify obstacles that were stopping students from finding the resources they needed on campus
After conducting these interviews, we used affinity diagramming to analyze our interview data and compile our findings
After attaining our key findings from analyzing our user interview data, we then proceeded to create two user personas to provide different perspectives and show what type of pain points each persona faces as they try to navigate campus
Putting Ourselves in the Shoes of Other Students
Our last step in our research was to use journey mapping and task analysis diagramming to visually show all of the steps needed to navigate from one place to another on campus. This was critical for us to truly narrow down our data and see what the most prevalent pain points are for other students on campus
Recommendations
If a campus way-finding app were to be created for U-M students in the future, it has been clear from this research that the major pain points for students lie in navigating buildings to locate their classrooms as well as finding essential student services. Recommendations would include to have floor-plans for each building added into the app so that a student could specifically search for a classroom and receive both directions to the building as well as which stairs to take, turns to take etc… inside the building to help them locate their classroom as fast as possible.
A second recommendation would be to have an interactive map that would allow students to use a categorical search function to find buildings and services that would fall into the same category as the one they are searching for. The relevant buildings would then pop-up on the map, introducing the student to services and buildings that they may not have known of before. This would then encourage students to seek out new buildings and services which in turn would make it so that less buildings and services are “hidden” on campus as students would have access to more information on what they could find.