UC Berkeley Dining Hall Crowd Meter
THE PROBLEM
Dining hall experience from UC Berkeley students generally hasn't been satisfying for most students. Varying from food quality, food variety, long lines, and much more, students complain about the dining hall experiences despite the fact that they pay a lot for the meal plans ($2,990 per semester for the most basic plan, which is 12 meal swipes a week and $300 flex dollars).
"How might we improve dining hall experience?"
USER RESEARCH
The goal of our research was to:
1. Identify a student’s dining hall experience overall, whether it is satisfying or not
2. Identify the key issues (ex. wait time, food quality etc.) that contribute to a student’s poor dining hall experience
After conducting several interviews and a survey with 44 UC Berkeley students, we were able to come up with several key insights:
1. Quality of food does not match students’ worth of meal plan expenses
2. Long and chaotic lines of the dining halls negatively effects the dining hall experience
3. Far distances of dining halls contribute to limited dining experience and range of food
3. Far distances of dining halls contribute to limited dining experience and range of food
4. Students typically miss dinner meals due to short operational hours
5. Dining halls are more of a social experience for freshm than a enjoyable meal
From these key insights, we were able to come up with two user personas and a journey map as shown below.
User Personas
Journey Map
IDEATION: DIVERGENT THINKING
I brainstormed 10 different solutions that could possibly address the problems that cause poor dining hall experience.
1. More organized & specific lines for Crossroads food - foot prints with section names
2. Spice corner with spices from different cultures (Chinese, Korean, Mexican, etc.)
3. Rotate menus for different dining halls so students don’t need to go to far dining halls
4. Dining halls take turns opening for an extra hour at night
5. Comment/photo system for online menu so people know if it’s accurate or not
6. Dining hall crowd meter like RSF so people can be aware of how long the lines are
7. Rating system for dining hall food so people are aware of the food quality
8. Virtual queue for dining halls - you get in line when it’s your time to get food
9. Rate system for specific menus and reject/improve menus that gets under a certain rate
10. Culture day 1-2 times a week, could even cater from restaurants around Berkeley
IDEATION: CONVERGENT THINKING
From the 10 ideas, I narrowed them down to 2 which seemed most feasible, which were (1) comment/photo system for online menu and (2) dining hall crowd meter.
LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
I have then created low-fidelity prototypes (user flow charts) for both as shown below, and the dining hall crowd meter was selected as the final idea.
MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
The mid-fidelity prototype was designed on Figma as an interactive app-type prototype.
Click HERE to test the mid-fidelity prototype.
INSIGHTS FROM USABILITY TESTING
After having someone test my mid-fidelity prototype, I've received some valuable feedbacks:
1. Everything was pretty intuitive because they were all labeled well
2. Adding a home button on the line page along with the back button will help navigating different dining halls more quickly
3. Use some icons or more simple labels
HI-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
Based on the feedbacks, I've improved the design of my prototype and added in a few other design aspects.
Click HERE to test the hi-fidelity prototype.
Thank you for reading!
