Jag Study
Jag Study is a website used by IUPUI students to reserve study rooms at IUPUI University Library.
Jag study is a reservation system used to book study rooms at IUPUI University Library. Students and visitors utilize private rooms at the library for group projects, meetings, individual studies, and research. IUPUI University Library offers study rooms to more than 29,000 students and campus visitors. We were tasked with redesigning the IUPUI study room reservation system to make it more efficient and user friendly.
The goals for our design team were to reduce the amount of time it takes to reserve a study room, minimize cognitive load, and increase user satisfaction by updating the user interface. I lead the team in the areas of ideation and prototyping.
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To begin empathizing with the students using the IUPUI room reservation system, first we wanted to become familiar with the problem space. We conducted 6 literature reviews to learn about applicable research of reservation systems and study room usage. To gain insight about similar products to IUPUI’s room reservation system, we performed a competitive analysis on 3 websites with comparable system features, results from the analysis are shown below.
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With our goal of understanding the students’ needs while using the IUPUI reservation system, we surveyed over fifty students. To gain insight about how students feel about the system we conducted six interviews. And to identify what opinions they had while using the system we performed six think aloud sessions. Major findings from the research is listed below.
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Once we finished our initial research, we started defining our users contextually by constructing an Affinity Diagram to categorize the key terms we identified in our research.
As we continued to synthesize the data that was gathered, an identify for the user started to form. To display the goals, behaviors, and motivations a persona was created.
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Our research led us to identify key aspects of the users’ experience, making us aware of design opportunities, to display this we mapped out the users’ journey.
The library room reservation system required students to recall too much information from one part of the interface to another while reserving a study room. This is a problem because it made the room reservation process time-consuming, confusing, and error prone.
Based on the insights we received from our research, we formulated design questions to lead our brainstorming session. We wanted to know…
We wanted to reimagine how the reservation system could be used by IUPUI students. So, we generated a list of fifty ideas, sketched out the ideas we believed that could possibly be the solution, and then reduced our list to three main ideas which is seen below.
AI will predict room recommendations based off of canvas course information
After comparing the final design concepts, the group decided to move forward with design concept 2: smart calendar and canvas integration for further evaluation. Concept 2 most aligned with our user research, implementation capabilities, and client goals.
We created wireframes to represent how we believed the structure and layout of the web page should look to address the students’ goals, needs, frustrations, and motivations we identified in our research. The images below show how we first envisioned how the IUPUI reservation system and the smart calendar/canvas integration would look.
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After creating the wireframes, we wanted to get feedback from our client Gary before moving forward with creating the High-fidelity prototype, you can view his feedback below.
"This looks really great. The only concern I have is if a room is not available for the time a user selects. In that scenario, there is no way to see if there are rooms that are open for part of the time or even when things are booked. The user would need to go through the process again, somewhat blind, trying to find a time where a room is open. This also ties into error correction, it seems a user will need to go through the entire process again if they make a mistake." -Gary
After receiving feedback on the wireframes, we then moved forward with creating a high-fidelity prototype that could be tested by students. We incorporated more functionality into our next iteration by including my bookings which gives students the capabilities to see current reservations, previous bookings, and recommendations. We also added filtering options to address the issues pointed out by the client and then we add IUPUI branding.
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Once the first iteration of the high-fidelity prototype was created we wanted to get some feedback from the students. We moderated six usability test on the prototype, in which we asked participants to think aloud as they perform 3 main task and then fill out a post-task questionnaire. This allowed us to see where participants may have trouble using the design and how they felt afterwards.
Insights gained from the usability test:
After finishing that round of testing and making the recommended changes we submitted the final design to our client Gary.
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After handing off our research and the final design of Jagstudy the project entered the development phase. Which resulted in many elements of our research and design being incorporated in the final system used today by students at IUPUI, which can be seen by this link or the images to the right.
After handing off our research and the final design of Jagstudy the project entered the development phase. Which resulted in many elements of our research and design being incorporated in the final system used today by students at IUPUI, which can be seen by this link or the images to the right.
Overall, we set out to redesign and improve IUPUI’s UniversityLibrary room reservation system. From our research of the students and the system, we identified areas where we could design solutions to meet the goals outlined by our client Gary.
JagStudy, provides students with a step-by-step process allowing them to seamlessly reserve study rooms. The added functionality such as my bookings makes the system more supportive of student goals by presenting them with the options to edit existing bookings, rebook previously used rooms, and by recommending new rooms.
After handing off our research and the final design of Jagstudy the project entered the development phase. Which resulted in many elements of our research and design being incorporated in the final system used today by students at IUPUI, which can be seen by this link or the images to the right.
