WRU (Where are you?)

WRU (Where Are You?) App

Defining The Problem
As Berkeley students, something that we all experience regardless of major and year, is the problem of the lecture hall seating process. Entering, finding a seat that fits your preferences and exiting a lecture hall can be more complex of a problem than it sounds.

User Research

Initially a team of 4, we decided to perform some User research in the area of seat selection processes, and find what criteria people use when choosing a seat, among other helpful information.

Some of the questions that the research tried to address were the following

-What factors influence a student’s seat selection process?

-Why do they choose to sit where they do?

-What can be changed in lecture halls?
-What specific lecture halls do students prefer to others and why?

Some key insights gained through this research were the following

-Students tend to prefer seats near their friends. They will sit where their friends are, even if that means not sitting in their preferred sit.

-It is very difficult for students to get into middle seats if they have to climb over multiple people. This reinforces sitting in the aisles.

-People who sit in the front often do so to pay attention, participate, or have a good view of the board.

Ideation

Divergent Thinking

Some of the ideas I initially considered were the following

- Create a device that mounts on seats and helps students find free seats faster

- Make middle seats more comfortable

- Add charging outlets only in the middle areas

- Assign seats to students at the beginning of the semester

Convergent Thinking

In order to give a solution to the problems posed by the key insights, I thought that if there was a better "organization" around the seat selection process, that would allow for more efficient seating.

As in big lecture halls finding one's friends is a relatively difficult task that takes time, my idea was to create an app that would make this easier. By automatically prompting users based on location to inform their lecture friends of their seating location, it would allow for a better communication between lecture friends.

Prototyping

Lo-Fi Prototype

In the Lo-Fi stage, I sketched some ideas of what I imagined my app looking like. In this way I also managed to figure out what some of its basic functions would be.

My idea was the following:

- the user logs their lecture times and locations

- the user adds a friends list from their contacts for each lecture

- at the time of the lecture, the app checks to see if the user is at the lecture hall (through location services)

- if the user is at the desired location and nobody from their friend list has not arrived first, they get a notification prompting them to notify their friends about their seating location (e.g 3rd row middle area)

- their "lecture friends" receive a notification specifying the user's seating area

Mid-Fi prototype

In my Mid-Fi prototype, I tried to keep the essential idea that I had sketched, adding very small changes. In this part of the design process, I tried to decide on, other than the functions, what the app would look like. Since the functionality of the app is relatively simple, I tried to not make the interface very complicated as that would deter users from using it.

Hi-Fi prototype

In the last part of the design process, I tried to refine my Mid-Fi design so that it would look realistic. I also designed some icons, like the lecture hall seat icon, and embedded actual iOS UI elements. I wanted to keep the simplicity in my design, and arrange elements on screen in a way such that users intuitively know where to click to execute the app's basic functions. Secondary functions like adding contacts to the User's friend list are "hidden away" so that they do not distract the user.