Google Design Challenge

Project brief

Prompt: Your school wants to provide dedicated spaces for students to help them focus on their academic studies. Design an experience for students, professors, and members of the school community to reserve work desks/spaces in the library. Consider the experience of checking availability, reserving the space, and reporting any issues.

Assumption

Due to the COVID, students don’t go to the library to study. Let’s assume this challenge is designed for the situation where students have regular and normal busy library study life (before COVID-19).

Understanding context

Comparative analysis

Existing Reservation System in UMICH

UMICH(University of Michigan) has 4 campuses, 20 libraries, 72 study spaces for people to reserve. They’re web-based and mobile browser-based. But the shortcoming of these reservations are:
1. Too many study space options, students don’t know when the rooms available in what buildings.
2. Study room description is separated from the reservation system. Users must go back and forth to finish a reservation.
3. No room equipment information available on the reservation page, which requires users much cognitive load on remembering the room type and name(especially for new users).
4.For expert users(use it frequently), no shortcut, a user must go through the whole process every time. (check availability, select time, and enter the username, etc.) The system doesn’t save the reserved room for people to access next time.
5. For group study, no way for members to know where the reserved room is.

Understanding users

Users context

Who are the users of library reservation services?

In general, people who use library reservation services are students, professors, and members of the school community. From my research, the use ratios for the three groups are:

1. Students. Students take 89% of the library reservation services. They’re the largest group of users who needs to reserve space in the library frequently. They’re using spaces for solo or for meeting with a group with quiet study or collaborative study.
2. Professors. Professors take 8% of the library room reservation services. They sometimes reserve spaces for lecture preparation or group meeting discussion with students.
3. Members of the school community. Those people including visitors, visiting scholars, guests reserve spaces. They take 3% of reservation services.

Thus, I focus my attention on the largest group of the user who needs to use the library reservation services. — Students

What are the general use cases of students’ reservation space in the library?

1. For collaborative purposes. Meet for a group project or engage with others while the study.
2. For solo study spaces. To get work done in quieter areas of the library.

68% of students use the reservation services for group study space in general. 32% of students use the reservation services for solo study quiet space. Thus, I decided to focus on this challenge on the — group study room reservation experience.

Solving problems with clear goals

Compile functions independently to reuse code

Strategically build functionalities cross-product line

Roadmap plan

I assume this app is going to implement. There is no technical constraint. AI technology is allowed. In order to build the app, smoothly integrates with Google software, building the 10 functions to achieve the MVP, I use the roadmap to track work. In phase 1, we can build the essential functions. In phase 2, we can consider building some advanced features, such as user profile, bookmark the library room, and we can explore reservation features to accommodate the needs of the professor and members of the school community

Quick translate high-level design concepts to tangible artifacts

Low-fidelity wireframe & scenarios

Scenario 1: on campus

“Jonny is walking on the UMICH campus. Today he has a to-do. He needs to book a group study space in the library for a group assignment discussion tomorrow. He opens the “library space reservation app” and checks the available group study rooms in the nearby library buildings through the phone. He finds an available room that matches the group meeting time, required room equipment, and room type. He books this room and sends the invitation to everyone, notifying them about the room location and reservation time. About 1 hour later, he received the group members’ confirmation email. He feels so happy. His to-do list complete today.”

Scenario 2: On the second day

“He receives a reminder on the phone 60 mins before the reservation starts while he is jogging in the park. After taking a quick shower, he decides to drive to campus. He opens the library space reservation app, checks the room location, and uses the navigation services to check road conditions and navigate to the locations.”

Scenario 3: In the reserved room

“He is discussing with members about a group assignment excitedly and doesn’t realize the ending time of the reservation is approaching. He receives a notification on the phone, asking whether he wants to extend the room. This room has some free time slots in the next two hours. He clicks extend the reservation time button and successfully extends the time. He feels so calm and happy. He has another 2 hours with group members continuing discussion on the assignments without worry about the room expiration.”

Build the testable design artifacts

High fidelity design

Due to the limited time, I built a high-fidelity design for some key screens.

Metrics tracks where the design needs to be better

Metrics plan

What metrics we can look at in order to know whether this design succeeds?

• Task Completion Success Rate — The percentage of correctly completed library space reservation.
• Task Completion Time — The time it takes for students to complete the task.
• Engagement rate — How often students interact with the product in a desirable way.
• Retention rate — The percentage of students who are using the library space reservation app in a certain number of days after the first try.

By tracking those data, we will know where are the places we can improve the design and how to improve it.

Design in confidence

Usability testing

I used my wireframe prototype and role-playing to conduct a user test with 2 people, I got several insights from users, and further refine my design, especially changed a part of the flow.

Insights：

1. In my initial design, users have questions on how a recommendation is provided because in their mental model they haven’t provided enough information to the system, so I changed to directly start to provide more preference information for them.
2. The user had a hard time understanding the word “time” and “duration”, and differences among the “Reserve”, “Book” and “Order”, so they find the onboarding question and some button name was a little unclear to perform an action.
3. Some users, especially those who have not used google assistant, need some time to acclimate the turn-taking in the App, and they don’t know when and what should they talk about.