Role
User Researcher, Front-end developer
Team
Katie So (Designer), John Chai (Back-end Developer), Evan Shu (Back-end Developer), Tilak Agarwal (Front-end Developer)
Duration
4 months
Background
This project was ideated and developed through the Spark! Innovation Fellowship that my team and I participated in January of 2021. We spent the initial two months researching and ideating our product and then moved into design and development for the rest of it.
Problem
New social distancing guidelines on campus has made studying and socializing difficult
Since the pandemic BU has issued new social distancing guidelines on campus which makes finding a space on campus to sit down and study or socialize much more difficult that it was before.
Students are spending too much time searching for vacant places on campus
The time consuming process of finding a spot from already limited seating is deterring students from coming to campus to study or socialize.
Students feel unproductive and are unhappy with their social life.
Since students are not spending a lot of time on campus they are not socializing in the capacity that they used to or wish to and they are also unable to find room to be productive and collaborate with other students.
Hypothesis
Our earlyvangelist user
Our most important job to be done
Top 3 pains for our priority user
Top 3 most valuable gains for our priority user
Validation
In order to move forward with forming a solution to our problem, we needed to validate that our identified problem was prevalent to a larger undergraduate student population at Boston University.
Validation Threshold
We set our validation threshold to 70% which means that if more than 70% of users interviewed agree with our hypothesis that current BU undergraduate students are having a difficult time finding a spot on campus then our hypothesis will be validated.
Interviews
My team and I conducted over 50 interviews to validate our hypothesis. These interviews were conducted amongst undergraduate students attending Boston University and living on or around campus. In order to get a holistic view on our hypothesis we interviewed the same number of people from each graduation class.
User Personas
Our interviews gave insight into the three types of primary users that would use our product.
User Job Maps
Our interviews gave us insight into the day to day lives of our primary users and the steps they take to find a location on campus to study or to socialize.
Job map for student looking for a spot to study
Job map for student looking for a spot to socialize with friends
Results from Interviews
After conducting all our interviews our hypothesis was overwhelmingly validated with nearly 80% of the primary users are looking for a solution to the problem we have identified.
Value Proposition Hypothesis
Our solution helps Boston University undergraduate students who want to find a spot to hang out or study on campus by monitoring and displaying how crowded areas on campus are at any given time.
Finding a Solution
Understanding the Competition
In order to find a ideal solution to our problem we wanted to look at what students are currently using as “partial solutions” to this problem and understand their shortcomings and also features that made them competitors.
Snapchat (Maps)
Snap Maps can show the population density of a give location. However this is a partial solution as users can only see the location of people they are friends with and who have their location enabled on the app. It was also location based on when the user last used the app and doesn't provide real time data.
Google Maps
Although Google Map provides more accurate information about peak crowded hours, it is not specific enough to buildings and floors at BU and does not give user enough information to know if there are any empty spots in a given location.
Boston University (book a room)
A feature offered by BU that allows students to reserve study spaces on campus. However, this feature is only applicable to one building at BU and students have limited chances to book a room.
How Might We (HMW)
In order to create an ideal solution for our users we asked ourselves questions based off input we received in interview to understand user needs and how might we address them.
Final User Story Map
We created a user story map to ideate our solution before design and development and hash out all the features, details, and goals we would like our product to address as well as some of our future goals with the app.
Our Product
After two months of research and ideation I transitioned to working as the front end developer for the team and developed the design and functionality we presented at the Spark! demo day.
Awards & Reflection
My team and I won the BU Spark! Demo Day 2021 Audience Choice awards out of 10 teams presenting their products. This was a great honor as the people voting for us were BU students for which we had developed and created this product.
This project was my first time working on a team as a researcher and I was able to learn so much about what goes into creating a user-centric and successful product.