Overview
Waycorn is smart navigation app that helps U of T students customize their wayfinding experience on campus by understanding campus specific knowledge, tapping into the student body’s co-intelligence, and making use of indoor routes and shortcuts, Waycorn aims to improve the student experience.
Just here to see pretty pics and highlights? 👀
My Role
UX Design
Team
Cody Foo, Menghan Wang, Michelle Yuan
Tools Used
Balsamiq, Figma
Timeline
2 Months
The Problem
The University of Toronto has hundreds of buildings across its campuses. The St. George Campus alone is made up of over 120 different buildings spread across an urban landscape. This can make navigating around the campus and between the campus difficult for new students, make it hard in the harsh winter environment that plays out over the majority of the regular school year, and confusing when every building has different codes and building names listed on signage and on new syllabi each semester.
Discovery
Interviews
Our team conducted user interviews with 9 UTSG students from different faculties and programs as well as both new and returning students, with the goal of finding out more information about the ways in which representative users travel across campus.
These informal interviews asked students broad questions about the nature of their schedules, the proximity of their classes, their understanding of campus layout overall and number scenario questions.
We asked users to show us how they might go about navigating to a building unfamiliar to them, how they might avoid inclement weather, and if they would be willing to adopt a new shortcut to arrive to class faster.
Surveys
In combination with our user interviews we conducted an online survey of U of T students receiving 36 responses from UTSG students across 8 different faculties, varying from first year students to masters students.
Slight majority are using shortcuts
Most students, especially those outside of their first year, already used some form of shortcut when navigating around campus.
Proof the Information Exists 🔎ℹ️
Those that don’t know, want to
Students who reported not using shortcuts, desired to, but didn’t know of any and wanted to learn.
Information Gap to be bridged 🌉
Those with shortcuts willing to share
Of the students who did know shortcuts, 77% were willing to share their shortcuts with other students.
Collective Knowledge that can be tapped 🧠
Additional Notes
Project Objectives
01 / Wayfinding on Campus
Improve the wayfinding experience for students on campus.
02 / Aggregate Information
Using reviews and usage data, build a knowledge base of quality tested wayfinding information.
Empathizing
From information learned in our user research we curated our findings first into a proto-persona and then a persona. The persona we created, Walking Wally is a first year international student beginning his second second semester at University of Toronto’s St. George Campus. He currently uses Google Maps to get to unfamiliar places but wants to learn and feel knowledgeble about campus and explore more even though he’s a commuter student. As an international student coming from a warmer climate, he doesn’t like cold weather and would enjoy staying out of the snow.
Persona
We also created an empathy map that notes what Wally would say, think, do, and feel while walking across campus and an as-is scenario to visualize a day in Wally’s life. This helped us identify places in Wally’s story where an intervention might be able to positively impact him.
Ideation
Big Ideas
With Wally’s story in mind, we engaged in a brainstorming session that included converging and diverging several times. Our team came up with about 40 ideas which was later brought down to about the 20, and then again brought down to 10. By removing ideas that were not right for the solution, and amalgamating ideas that were very similar like those relating to signage and signalling what’s around, we were able to trim to a much more workable number.
Prioritization
By plotting on a grid of both impact and feasibility and voting for ideas as a team, we were able to identify which of our ideas was would provide the most positive change in experience for the lowest cost. This provided guidance for what should be tackled first in a minimum viable product.
To-Be Scenario
Using the ideas we prioritized, we aimed to rewrite Wally’s story using the intervention of our solutions across each phase of his journey. In Wally’s to-be scenario, he’s able to enter building codes, learn about the campus, utilize signage, know exactly where he is and more, resulting ultimately in him arriving to class on time, warm and ready for class.
User Stories
As a method of aligning our goals moving forward, we wrote 4 user stories. Each of these statements of intent include a who (the specific user or type of user), a what (a specific user enablement), and a wow (a specific unique value statement for that user).
1
2
3
4
Prototyping & Evaluation
Lo-Fi Prototype
Using the ideas we focused on, we storyboarded Wally’s journey travelling from where he gets off the subway at Queens Park station, to his destination of class BA1180 in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology. We then created a low fidelity paper prototype using our ideas.
*Click the image to enlarge
Guerilla User Testing with students
Likes
We conducted user testing with 4 representative users who we guided through our proposed user flow. Every participant we tested with found that this app would be useful to them and addressed the problem we were looking to solve.
Feedback
Users liked the app overall but noted some feature that could be improved upon, or that didn’t make sense to them. After coming back together and discussing as a team, we considered solutions to our lo-fi storyboard that could improve these issues:
Mid-Fi Prototype
We created a mid-fidelity prototype in Balsamiq that follows the same happy path flow from the Lo-Fi Storyboard and integrating changes based on feedback from users.
*Click the image to enlarge
Usability Testing & Heuristic Evaluation
We conducted usability testing with 4 new representative users who we guided through our proposed user flow, as well as with senior UX professionals. After compiling the findings and reconvening as a group, we looked for ways to improve the experience noted below:
Hi-Fi Prototype
Using the feedback from the last round of testing above, we created a high-fidelity storyboard as well as mockup in Figma.
*Click the image to enlarge
Results
The stakeholders we presented our solution to at U of T Innovation Hub praised our identification of the problem, as well as our solution noting that our solution was feasible and could not only be useful to those we designed for (students) but they as employees and faculty would love something like this as well.
They noted they would like to see us take this project further by submitting the project idea formally.
Key Lessons
How to use nearly wrench hammer and screwdriver in the toolbox
Of course this project, was not every, wrench hammer and screwdriver in the toolkit but this project was a student project meant to get us comfortable with the various tools in a UX designer’s toolbox, get us acquainted with agile methodology, and how to design a product with users at its core.
We used even more than were described here and there are still many more tools we didn’t involve, but part of being an effective designer is knowing when and where to use the correct tools for the job, which I aim to perfect in additional projects in the future.
Storytelling as a core tenet of UX design
This project taught me just how valuable storytelling is from start to finish in UX. It’s incredibly effective as a way of identifying issues and areas of improvement in user research talking to users and hearing their stories, as well as empathizing with users and identifying opportunities for improvement through storyboarding, as-is, and to-be scenarios. It also ties in incredibly well as a way of thinking through processes when prototyping solutions.
Finally, when done correctly, it’s especially effective in persuasion when pitching a product and helped us win over stakeholders at the Innovation Hub.
