In collaboration with the University of Toronto's Innovation Hub, my team sought to ease access to the recreational facilities for the student body.
As it currently stands, booking a facility at the University of Toronto (U of T) is a long, complicated and disorganized process through the Universities website. Each of our team members in turn have also shared a negative experience trying to gain access to the gym and other U of T facilities, with it leaving us frustrated and dejected.
So, we asked a simple question: How can we improve this for others?
A Mobile App!
Through our user research data, analysis and prototyping, the easiest and most comprehensive solution was to create an app that's sole purpose is to immediately access and book recreational resources.
My team included Keti Dzamova, Stefan Navarrete Lansall, Amy Chen Hui Ling Li & Miranda Yuan Meng and our case study was conducted over a period of 6 weeks. I personally took charge of taking interviews, usability testing and designing major parts of the medium fidelity prototype.
Secondary Research
After deciding to focus on access to recreational resources, my team and I did a number of comprehensive studies, including:
- A Competitive Analysis
- An Analysis of Social Media Sentiments
- Research Into Scholarly Articles
Primary Research
Using the secondary research touched on before, my team and I honed in on a series of questions which could elicit an understanding of the pain points facing users of the U of T recreational website. These questions were used in:
- A Survey
- Multiple Semi-Structured Interviews
Our survey was published as a google form and posted on a number of communication channels including Reddit and Discord, while we conducted our interview via Zoom. Each participant was screened to ensure they were representative users, students at U of T. Our interviews contained questions like:
- Interviewer:Walk me through the last time you booked a gym or recreational program at UofT.
- Did you find anything challenging about reserving a time slot?
- Do you have any positive experiences reserving a time slot?
- Do you have any negative experiences reserving a time slot?
- Do you use any tools to stay organized/keep track of your appointments? (e.g. google calendar, agenda etc.)
- How did booking a time slot make you feel?
Participant:.....
Overall Findings
We found several pain points which can be grouped into four themes:
1
Scheduling Difficulties
2
Communication and Information Finding
3
Physically Accessing and Finding Facilities
4
Personal Motivation
Each of these reflects issues of scheduling and the organization of information on the sport and recreation website
Persona and Empathy Map
We created this persona based on the pain points highlighted before, with specific intention to cater our design towards new students, people of colour and other marginalised groups.
During each subsequent step of the design process, we reflected and correlated our designs to our persona, which sat at the core of our thinking.
As-Is Scenario
To understand how users interacted with the current iteration of the U of T Recreation website, we created a Current User Journey or As-is Scenario highlighted below.
Each step took our persona through the typical way users interacted and booked on the current platform, highlighting the pitfalls and grievances, i.e pain points, conveyed in our user research.
Big Ideas
Every member individually drew out a way to answer those pain points. Our individual work was collected and placed on a prioritization grid where we each voted according to feasibility and importance.
Through voting we arrived on a number of "Home Run" ideas or the most feasible and important. These were:
- Get notified of new availabilities
- Personalised fitness based on recommendations
- Ability to invite friends
The first image on the right is the final Big Ideas screen. With every subsequent image reflecting the process of getting there, from sticky notes to a Figma Document.
Hill Statements
To align our team in our design process, we came up with three hill statements, a statement used to focus a product around the value that it delivers, to address our personas pain points. These were:
- Neven the New Student can discover preferred exercise activities in less than a minute
- Neven the New Student can keep an exercise streak while managing a full time course load
- Neven the New Student can feel comfortable using the gym with a growing circle of friends
These Hill statements situated and guided how we would overcome each pain point in our prototypes.
We started the design process with an initial low fidelity prototype, shown in the third slide. Each member of my team drew a series of prototypes which illustrated ways in which the hill statements could be addressed.
With each of our individual drawings on every hill statement finished, we consolidated our work by choosing which aspects of the app from all of our prototypes that we believed would work the best, as shown in the second slide and first slide.
We followed up with usability testing conducted via Zoom, in which we asked participants a series of questions and asked them to do a think aloud protocol, in which they spoke as they went through the app.
Medium Fidelity Wireframe
Following participant feedback from our low fidelity prototype we constructed a medium fidelity wireframe. Adding and removing aspects of the app that participants had found to be frustrating or confusing.
The wireframe can be found within this Figma Link.
We optimised three flows and constructed our medium fidelity prototype on Figma. These three flows reflected the hill statements, with each focusing on a different pain point users experienced while navigating the current iteration of the U of T recreation website.
We then had a final usability test of our medium fidelity prototype. From participant feedback via a think aloud protocol, we consolidated our work. Doing three things in particular, which were:
- Removing favorites and organizing the booking menu
- Altering the favorites menu to be more readable
- Restructuring the alerts screen to be more accessible for finding waitlist and friends messages
These changes can be reflected below in blue, in contrast to the initial medium fidelity prototype above. Additionally, the final medium fidelity clickable prototype can be found through this Figma Link.
Evaluation
I struggled a lot initially with user testing but it came to be one of my most significant strengths, along with prototyping. I grew a skillset in both throughout this case study and it was intrinsic in creating a framework I can use in future work opportunities.
