Timeline:
January-April 2022 (12 weeks)
Role:
Head Designer (Student Project)
P R O B L E M
Why can’t SMU students rely on their phone to book school facility for their meetings or self-study session?
Group Study Rooms (GSR) or Project Rooms are Singapore Management University (SMU) students’s favourite venue to hold their meetings or self-study sessions. However, it is mandatory for us to book the facility through the SMU Facility Booking System (FBS) before using them. Unfortunately, this is how SMU FBS look like in our phone which forces us to use our laptop in order to have a better booking experience.
Images are taken by my group member Megan Sim Shi Hui
So, “How might we make the SMU FBS experience less time consuming and allow students to book on the go?”
T H E S O L U T I O N
Introducing SMU FBS 2.0 🎉
Based on our survey, 80% of the students would like a mobile app. Therefore, my team and I decided to design a mobile app for the new SMU FBS.
S T A G E 1 : R E S E A R C H
Survey
My team and I conducted a Heuristic Evaluation in order to avoid bias mindset; since were also the users of the booking system. Based on our findings, the top three usability heuristics which have the highest severity rating are: Aesthetic & Minimalistic Design, User Control & Freedom and Error Prevention.
Then to backed our initial findings, I guided the team to create our survey questions based on the following:
People’s booking habits
Device used to make the booking
Average time needed to complete the booking with the device
How many people used and completed their booking through their phone
What stopping the people for not using their phone to make/complete booking
People’s overall experience of using the SMU FBS system in their phone
S T A G E 2 : I D E A T I O N & S O L U T I O N S
Summarising and Kickstarting our design brain juice
We summarised our findings by creating a user journey to see the common experience, gain further insights and provide recommendations for the design.
S T A G E 3 & 4: D E C I D I N G + P R O T O T Y P I N G + T E S T I N G
Iterate, iterate and iterate to find the one
Utilising the different recommendations, we started to look at different UI to design the best visualisation of booking inputs as well as the available facilities. Singapore Airline Mobile application and LiquidSpace.com were sources of our inspirations!
User Testing #1
I was unsure which interface was the best to display the available facilities after the users keyed in their booking preference. That was why I created two designs: idea 1 and idea 2 in order to test them out with our users.
Result:
Idea1: 1/5 students manage to go to the facility detail page through a single click.
Idea2: 3/5 students manage to go to the facility detail page through a single click
Summary: Proceed with Idea2 for future user testing
User Testing #2
Now that we know which design to focus on, we conducted another user testing in order gain more suggestions on how to further improve the design.
S T A G E 5 : F I N A L
