My Role

Problem Definition

Our design challenge goal is to design an experience that allows students to report building or equipment issues on campus, considering for the process of filing and acting on the issues. It is visible that the university’s campus is aging due to daily use with constant repairs which need to be done with limited staff and budget.

For the past decade, students have the option of calling a 24/7 hotline for urgent issues or send an email to the school for non-urgent issues. However, due to low site visibility, poor communication and slow response times it is difficult for users to be proactive in taking responsibility to report problems on campus. Thus, resulting in poor campus maintenance and further deterioration of the university’s buildings.

Current webpage to report campus maintenance issues

Product Goal

To increase overall campus health and safety, the new service request feature must be convenient, efficient, safe, accessible and provide a variety of options to help report issues on campus. The new system must be able to integrate within student workflows and increase communication between plant operations staff and students. The new system must work 24/7 all year-round and be integrated within the University’s current ecosystem of applications.

User Experience Goals

Using the Microsoft’s Desirability toolkit, I was able to make a list of user experience goals that I wanted users to feel when using the new system. This toolkit assisted in identifying what emotions we want to elicit from the user before, during and after the use of the system, resulting in the following user experience goals

• Users should trust the system and university plant operations staff that their request will be completed
• Users should feel confident in being able to know how to contact the school when reporting a maintenance issue and that they’ve included adequate information
• Users should feel that the system is convenient and easy to use without hesitation, users should not be hesitant to report any maintenance or repair issues on campus
• Users should feel confident in the system and sense that it is a reliable method of reporting issues that will be attended to

Usability Goals

• The core feature of the new system is to ensure that users can report an incident to the highest degree of detail. Missing details in reports lowers the overall efficiency as can result in longer response time
• It is crucial for the new reporting system to not take away any key functionality that is already in place. The new system must enhance the quality of information received and aid in the comprehension for plant operations to take appropriate actions.
• The design for the new system must also be accessible for the 30,000+ students on campus. All students with or without a disability should be able to report an issue with the same level of clarity and detail like any other member would.

Process

1. Value Proposition

I reached out to the Universities Plant Operations office and got in touch with the plant operations manager Jennifer Letson. After a series of emails and conversations I learned that university receives on average 30+ requests per week from issues ranging from mechanical issues to coffee spills in classrooms which then need to be manually assigned to the appropriate team. What Jennifer believes is that the university should have a better system that allows students to report issues efficiently, is effective in helping maintain the campus and is accessible to all members of the university to use.

2. Understanding our Users

To understand what current user pain points exist in the service, I conducted 6 user interviews with students and staff who previously had interactions with plant services. Below are quotes extracted from user interviews, capturing their overall sentiment.

Quotes extracted from user interviews with students

3. Service Design Blueprint

With the help of Plant Operations Manger Jennifer Letson, I was able to construct a service design blueprint containing behind the scenes technologies and actors that play the part in helping resolve campus maintenance requests. This helped me visualize the relationship between service components and identify current user pain points

• Users had trouble knowing when someone was coming and how long it was going to take. It was often easier to just ignore the issue and let someone else take care of it
• Users also had trouble knowing what exact information was needed and therefore lacked the knowledge to put what was required by plant operations dispatch staff
• Users had limited knowledge on how to contact plant services and the variety of services plant operations offer for the campus

Service Design Blueprint of plant operations at the University of Waterloo

4. Assumptions

• Waterloo has a suite of mobile applications, WAT Safe for general student safety and UW Portal, a digital campus toolkit. I decided to integrate my current solution within UW Portal, an application designed to be the central hub for Waterloo students to access their timetable to campus services
• Integrating with the UW Portal App meant that specific branding and typography had to be used to simulate realistic integration within plant operation services
• I assumed that the most ideal and feasible solution that most users would want to adopt would be a mobile solution due to the ever-growing convenience of our smartphones

5. Sketching Session

Now with key pain points, product goals and product features in mind, I proceeded to sketch low level wireframes to illustrate all my thoughts on paper

Lo-fi initial sketching of user flow in application

6. Wireframe Flow

From there I went onto translate my rough sketches and product features into medium fidelity wireframes, picking and choosing the most appropriate product path

Medium fidelity wireframes of application user flow

7. Color and Typography

Due to integration with UW Portal, I was limited to the type of font and color palette tolerance allowed. Colors an typography are laid out to give an overall feel for the consistent styling used.

Typography and color palette of UW Portal Application

8. Feature Details

In this new feature, users now have the option to submit new requests, keep track of existing requests as well as enables to open for users to see the status of their request. Once a user decides to make a request for plant services they are prompted with a decision for urgent and non-urgent issues, this helps divert issues that are truly urgent to help right away and other non-urgent issues to be entered the CMS and assigned accordingly. Next users can quickly categorize and add supporting details such as a description or media assists to give plant services a better understanding of the maintenance issue.

In addition, With the integration of Google Maps, users can also find the specific room and room level or manually enter in the location. Finally, users can see a final summary of their request details which will be sent to plant operations. Upon submission plant operations can now dispatch the appropriate teams without missing information and students can go back to view issue status, edit details and view who is going to help them for a more personalized experience with University staff.

9. Final Result

Finally, the summation of my following efforts have led to this first iteration

Conclusion

Upon the completion of version 1.0 of the service request feature, initial early prototype testing was done on the design and classmates helped with providing feedback and comments of what their ideal user experience was. Depending on your audience and who tests your solution, there may be a certain bias requiring the designer to filter out the “noise” and extract what really matter. It was difficult to design a system from the group up with no real existing experience, I would like to pursue pilot testing to test the likelihood of campus wide adoption.

For future continuations of this project, I would continue to investigate the viability of the service request feature as well as other digital experiences through a desktop platform or process improvements to University of Waterloo’s plant operations.