Campus Navigation
Team
4 UX Researchers
Timeline
10 Weeks
(September - November)
Research Methodologies
Interviews
Affinity Diagramming
Survey Analysis
Personas
Storyboarding
Task Analysis Diagramming
Summary
Commuting around campus is the core of every student’s life at college. However, residential situations, class locations, and access to transportation is vastly different amongst students and the University of Michigan’s campus traverses 3,070 acres between a North and Central Campus.
The University of Michigan would like to create a campus way-finding app to help students better navigate for their day-to-day activities. My team of UX Researchers were tasked to identify biggest challenges undergraduate students’ face when finding what they need (e.g., classes, services, food) on campus.
Recruitment Criteria & Process
Screening questions:
What is your name, year, and major?
Where do you live on campus (dorm, apartment, house)?
Do you have any special modes of transportation on campus, other than walking?
Anything else you would like to tell us about yourself before we begin?
Inclusion criteria:
Undergraduate student at the University of Michigan
Lives on/near (within ~5 miles of) campus
Interview Usability Task
After recruiting 8 University of Michigan undergraduate students, we were ready to conduct our usability tests. These interviews were semi-structured with grand-tour questions, mini-tour questions, example questions, and experience questions. All of our interview questions were designed to be non-directive to prevent bias in our interviewees’ answers.
During each interview we had our participants map their routes on 2 versions of a campus map that we provided— one created by the university that contained a key to all the campus buildings and another that was a screenshot from Google Maps. This helped us better understand their step-by-step traveling process on campus for common activities (classes, food, clubs, etc.) and what types of way-finding tools given on a navigation app are most useful.
Interview Synthesis & Analysis
After conducting our user interviews and coding the interview transcripts, we transferred outstanding quotes and notes to sticky-notes on our team Miro Board. There, we conducted affinity diagramming by grouping sticky notes together underneath emerging themes.
Survey Design
Based on the themes we discovered from affinity diagramming our user interviews, we created a survey with pointed questions to gain quantitative data for our research questions.
Survey Findings
Deliverables
After synthesizing our interview and survey data, we decided to create the following deliverables to best represent our key findings in an empathetic manner for our product designers & developers.
User Personas
Task Analysis Diagram
Storyboard
Recommendations
The data gathered from this study uncovered that the root of the majority of students’ challenges when navigating around campus is not in their unfamiliarity with campus. Rather, the main pain points are in getting to class on time and navigating within buildings. For the University of Michigan’s navigation map, we recommend focusing on providing an ETA and foot traffic features to help students better plan their commutes.
Additionally, we recommend developing a new-route finding feature to help students with various travel habits. Allowing students the ability to discover more scenic, quiet, or less crowded paths can better meet students’ campus way-finding needs so that their commute time is enjoyed and efficiently spent.
What I Learned
🔑 Be a good listener
This was my first self-led UX research project and I learned that the reason why the protocol when conducting user interviews is to have an interviewer asking questions, a notetaker, and a recorder in case the team needs to re-listen to the interview. In order to prevent any important details falling through the cracks I need to be a good listener!
📊 Wording matters to get meaningful data
When designing our user interviews & the survey questionnaires, a large learning curve I experienced was how to ask non-leading questions & articulate usability tasks clearly during the interview. Now I know how important it is to word questions intentionally and how to write those questions myself.