The new activity center in the university has just completed and will be available in next semester, yet the music rehearsal space is used by students, professors and community members. Design the reservation experience for users to check availability and reserve one of the music rehearsal spaces within the new center. Please provide your overall process, a wireframe flow, and several screens at higher fidelity.

Duration: 1-week individual design sprint

Type: UI/UX Design, Mobile APP

My Role: UX Designer, UX Researcher

Skills: Background Research, Competitive Analysis, User Interview, Persona, Wireframe, Prototyping

Process Overview

During this design sprint, I made use of skills in both UX and agile design process: defining problems and tasks, highlighting pain points, mapping user flows, prototyping scenarios, and communicate with a high-fidelity mockup of mobile app. After all, I looked back at all the thing went through, and evaluate the overall pros and cons.

Problem Scope

Since the activity center is newly built and available resources are quite limited, I decide to take the student activity center at the University of Michigan as a real-world example to conduct my research. Moreover, to guarantee each category of users has the same chance of reservation, it is only allowed to reserve the space for 1-hour each time, and does not support multiple reservations per day. Meanwhile, the new student activity center is mainly served for people on-campus or from local community.

Personas

In order to understand the real pain points of target users, I conducted user interviews with 7 participants, including 2 professors from U-M School of Music, 3 students from U-M Music Student Associations, and 2 activity organizers from M-Community.

Base on the interview result, I synthesized interview transcript and pulled out highlighted sentences and merge into potential pain points. Then, I create three target personas according to different occupation and needs of each user group.

Key Findings

The interview process streamlines the three major needs of the target user groups. Firstly, the space has to be time-driven to guarantee a wider range of use. Also, there are different demands on music equipment, which may need further assistance on reservation. Last but not the least, the space can be made the best use once the room capacity really fits the amount people to use. These three aspects are closely related to each other, so mapping user flow logically and comprehensively is the key to proceed this task.

Flow Chart

Base on the users’ need, I established user flow chart to streamline the overall process of space reservation experience, which has subtle differences in various user groups, but with similar task flows overall.

Paper Prototype

Following the reservation process, I conducted a round of paper prototype, to sketch out the main interface of the mobile app, with annotations below commenting on main functions and interactions.

Digital Prototype

After several rounds of interaction, I created the high-fidelity mockups in Adobe XD, and highlighting six key screens of the app, which includes user experience of onboarding, search, filter, rank, reserve, and confirm.

Interaction Map

To get a panoramic view of the integrity, I build up the interaction map of this app, which help to generate a static representation of the hierarchy relationship between key interfaces. This representation visualizes all the possible interactions. Below is the aggregation of screenshots for every interaction that users can make on the app, which leads to other categories that shows what will happen in next steps. 

Future Steps

Due to the time limitation, I am not able to accomplish all the task perfectly. Looking back to what I have done, there are still some aspects that I believe further improvements could be made. Firstly, I would conduct user research in a large scale of representative users, to acquire the most objective and convincing statistics. Then, it would be better if I could conduct extra rounds of iteration on heuristic evaluation, and invite people to participate in usability testing, to make all the design more solid. Last but not the least, I would think of combining other key functions during reservation experience, and build an app for my school and prospective students.

Key Takeaways

• Be a proactive designer and rigorous researcher

• Always validate design assumptions with users

• Be responsible for design as well as the product

• Think from a panoramic view when designing functions

• Combination of convergent and divergent thinking