Humble
A quick way to find a seat in lecture.
Sit down!
Explaining The Problem
Research Question
Students tend to avoid sitting in the middle seats of a lecture hall. Students want seats in the aisles, creating difficulty for incoming students who have to climb over many people to access the remaining middle seats. My research team wondered what the motivations are for seat selection among students and how we might create a better lecture hall seating experience. We researched the topic: How might we encourage students to fill in the seats of a lecture hall?
User Research
We conducted 12 user interviews to understand students' lecture hall seating experience. Some key insights included:
(1) Students aim for aisle seats to exit the lecture hall quickly.
(2) Students who are late seek seats in the back or in the aisles for easiest access.
(3) People tend to leave seats open in between them.
(4) People avoid middle seats because they are hard to access and exit from.
Informative quotes:
“I normally sit on the aisles or in the back because I arrive on the later side and I feel awkward if I have to walk in front of the whole class to get a different seat."
“I try to sit on the aisles and close to an exit so I can get out as fast as possible. I don’t like being pushed by other people.”
Divergent Thinking
For divergent thinking ideation, my team created a large affinity map based off of our user interviews to come up with user pain points and user needs for a potential design solution.
Convergent Thinking
After completing the affinity mapping, I considered which information would be most helpful for coming to a design solution. I decided to use the knowledge that (1) most users wanted easily accessible aisle seats and (2) most pain points stemmed from not being able to easily access/exit seats to begin low-fidelity prototyping.
Low-Fidelity Prototyping
I initially created design solutions by (1) redesigning the lecture hall itself to have more thin seating columns and (2) introducing the concept of "GSI police." These are sketches of storyboards that center around these different design solutions. They show the role of the product solutions:
Mid-Fidelity Prototyping
I chose to iterate on the physical lecture hall redesign on Adobe Illustrator. User feedback said that aisles of three in my original design may have been too numerous and chaotic, creating confusion for users. I improved my design solution of the lecture hall to be more spacious and have fewer seating aisles with four seats per aisle.
Insights from Usability Testing
Though users liked my lecture hall redesign and believed it was functional in theory, they pointed out that it was not practical. It would take years and large monetary funding for a university to actually implement the design. Therefore, I needed an alternate solution that could be implemented easily and immediately. The solution lay in a seat-assigning mobile app: Humble. I created the app prototype using Adobe XD.
Final Product Prototype
What is Humble?
Humble is a mobile app targeted towards UC Berkeley students that solves the issue of filling in lecture hall seats. It quickly and efficiently assigns students seats in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
Video Demo
Interactive Demo
