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ma(i)ze

PROJECT TYPE:

Senior Coursework Project - UX Research Course

PROJECT TOOLS:

Miro, Figma, & Google Suite

TEAM & ROLES:

  • Ian: UX Researcher

  • Sahaja: UX Researcher

  • Yuijin: UX Researcher

  • Rachel: UX Researcher

THE ISSUE?

Currently, students at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor find themselves having to use navigational applications to traverse our large campus. However, navigational applications on the market are not tailored to campus travel. This is where we introduce Ma(i)ze. Ma(i)ze is a campus-based navigational application to help students easily traverse the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's campus.

WHAT'S THE PROJECT GOALS?

While there are many navigation applications on the market currently, such as Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze, none of them offer the in-depth ability to help with campus travel.With Ma(i)ze, my team hopes to fill this void in the market by providing an application that offers comprehensive navigation assistance to University of Michigan-Ann Arbor students.

DATA COLLECTION & ANALYSIS

Developing our case study for Ma(i)ze my team and I conducted eight contextual inquiry interviews with students of varying grade level statuses, with a focus on new students, as we believe they are the ones who could benefit the most from the creation of Ma(i)ze. During these contextual inquiries, we asked our participants a variety of questions and had them perform various tasks, which we recorded and converted into transcripts. Once we had our transcripts, my team and I began to code (mark up) pain points that our participants mentioned throughout their interviews, leading us to create an affinity diagram in Miro of our findings.

Screen Shot 2022-11-17 at 2_51_01 PM.webp

Google Forms Responses & Google Sheets Graphs

After my team and I reflected upon the contextual inquiry data we had collected and then grouped it into a Miroboard,
we then created an 18-question Google Forms survey from the main pain points we found from our initial data collection, which we sent out and received 18 responses from. After analyzing our newly gained data we created four Google Sheets graphs to visualize our newly acquired data, with each graph visualizing the comparisons between two to three different questions from our Google Forms survey responses.

DELIVERABLES

Once graphing and reviewing our newly obtained data in conjunction with our initial data, my team and I began to create three types of deliverables those being two personas, one journey map, and one storyboard. Development of our journey map and storyboard occurred after the creation of our two personas, Jennie Kim and Noah Schnapp. When creating Jennie Kim and Noah Schnapp, we pulled their attributes directly from our Google Form responses. My team and I found that majority of our respondents were third and fourth-year undergraduate students who live off campus, leading to those attributes being given to persona Noah Schnapp. We then found our next largest group was new students to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which were primarily freshmen who live in residential halls on campus, leading to our persona Jennie Kim gaining similar attributes. After the creation of our personas, my team and I then began the development of our journey map and storyboard, with our journey map taking on the current state of what using a navigational application on the market is like, and our storyboard taking on a future state, showing what the creation of Ma(i)ze could offer to students traversing the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's campus.

Personas

Journey Map (Current State)

User Journey Map- 5 Phases.webp

Storyboard (Future State)

Basic_Storyboard_Template_(Community) 2.webp

WHAT'S THE NEXT STEPS?

While Ma(i)ze was a class project that was confined to around 10 weeks, I can see the data collected for Ma(i)ze being used in a few different ways. The data gained for Ma(i)ze could be used to continue the development of Ma(i)ze, with the next steps being creating prototypes for the application and conducting user testing. However, while the continued development of Ma(i)ze would be ideal, I don't believe it is realistic. Continuing the development of Ma(i)ze would require either having the current team of Ma(i)ze wanting to continue the project, or finding a completely new team to continue this project, with the current team, including myself, wanting to move on to other projects at this time. However, while I don't think the continued development of Ma(i)ze is practical, I do see our team potentially giving our data to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor to aid in the creation of an application catered to traversing the university's campus. Our data recorded student responses about their thoughts, feelings, and actions while and about traversing the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's large campus, as well as including student feedback on features students would like to see included in a campus navigation application, such as the alert of campus construction and directions to classrooms within buildings, which would be beneficial for the university to know when developing such an application.

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