Helping Tertiary Institution students to manage hostel reservations (UX Case Study)
Brief:
Your school has built a new student hostel and is looking to you for some design expertise to manage reservations. Design the experience to help students find a room and connect with their ideal roommate, considering factors including age, gender, temperament, and department. Provide your overall process, a flow, and 2–3 higher-fidelity screens.
Problem:
Many students of Nigerian tertiary institutions find it difficult to get roommates when they get admission during their 100-level first semester, especially in public institutions. However, this project is to help them bridge the gap and provide them with a well-established school hostel that will indeed cater to their needs.
CHALLENGE FACED BY USER
During the qualitative phase of this project, we observed that the majority of the users in public tertiary institutions do not prefer to stay on school campuses because of the poor environment, no privacy with their belongings, hike in price, and cultism within the school premises.
OBJECTIVE
- Provide a platform where students can meet roommates for their personality.
- Providing a solution that would make school hostels more appealing to the students.
- Ensuring that students get roommates in the same department.
SOLUTION
- To ensure that it is very seamless for students to add up a roommate after paying for a hostel.
- Providing a conducive environment for students to have their departmental colleagues as roommates.
- Creating a platform where students can connect with their ideal roommate, considering factors like age, temperament, and department.
- Building a solution that helps payment of hostels be easy and transparent between peers when splitting payment.
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH PHASE
After understanding the design process, I conducted research to understand the user’s point of view on the state of hostels in tertiary institutions across the nation. During the findings, I got a lot of reactions and concerns while some students prefer schools’ hostels; and other detest them, especially in public universities and polytechnics.
EMPATHY MAPPING
USER PERSONA
Immediately, after the research, I created a user persona to understand the users’ view from the perspective of their gender.
USER FLOW
For the user flow, I focus on what the problem of the brief instructed me to solve as a solution. However, I discovered that students find it hard to connect with other students when searching for hostels. So, this flow bridges the gap, just to make a seamless connection with other roommates.
HIGH FIDELITY
The high fidelity is to proffer solutions to the brief. By helping the students to get a hostel easily without any hindrance, and connect with their fellow roommates at the click of a button. I make the Hi-Fi to be friendly to navigate because users intend to be frustrated with complex navigation or design.
TESTING
During the testing phase of this design, I sent out the prototype link to stakeholders; students, and university management. Only five stakeholders responded back to the testing.
The testing was conducted using Google Meet and the stakeholders were asked to discuss their experience with the app, however, only two out of the stakeholders made a correction, concerning the list of hostels, room details, and occupant details.
Well, in the previous design, those sections did not really the brief, but after the stakeholder’s concerns, I iterated on the sections and made it more meaningful to address the solution of the product, which means designing the experience to help students find a room and connect with their ideal roommate, considering age, gender and department.
All the corrections from the three stakeholders were put into the final outcome of the product, while the remaining two stakeholders didn’t have anything to say. This means the design and iteration fulfill the purpose of the design.
Thank you
Connect with me🤝
Email: batunde.alaran@gmail
Phone: 08076926109
X: @Tude_Design0
LinkedIn: Babatunde Alaran
