UC Berkeley's Personalized Study Spot App

By: Sophie Lenz

At UC Berkeley, a common issue among students is consistently finding a spot on campus to study. Many factors contribute to a student's search including location, capacity, food regulations, and more. Therefore, I sought to create a solution to the question: How might we optimize the process of finding libraries and buildings with open study spaces on UC Berkeley campus?

After completing 8 user interviews of current UC Berkeley students, we broke down the issue into the following parts:

1. Some prefer to study in buildings and not libraries in order to collaborate with others, eat, and to have an easier time finding a table.

2. The most time people will go to libraries is when they are already on campus

     2a. Leads to an overcrowding of libraries at peak hours during the day, as well       as a spike in people in the campuses’ most central libraries (Moffitt, Doe, Stacks)

I specifically looked at this user persona, Amy. I wanted to address the common issue of finding open seating during peak hours, when many like Amy are primarily on campus. Although the popular libraries may be crowded at these times, many buildings have open seating that many students are not aware of. I hoped to design an app that would show capacity information about not only libraries, but also campus buildings.

My low-fidelity prototypes were similar to the RSF idea, while also incorporating some of my own ideas, including navigation, favorites, and building details. I built on user feedback regarding the lack of information about various campus buildings, and tried to implement it in my prototypes.

For my mid-fidelity prototype, I used Figma to further develop my ideas. I wanted to try to combine the ideas of both low-fidelity prototypes in order to have the most information about each building, as well as real-time capacity updates.

Insights:

- Many users thought they wound find the app helpful, especially for those who were new to campus

- Some users believed the map would only be of use to some, due to the prevalence of Google Maps

- Further, users didn't think navigation was necessary

- Users thought the design was straightforward, but would definitely benefit from more pictures or icons

- Users generally preferred exact table availability numbers over a percentage (like the RSF crowd meter)

For my hi-fidelity prototype, I tried to incorporate user feedback and further build on my mid-fidelity prototype with images and icons. Below is a screenshot of the four frames I created, as well as a link to test the prototype.