Improving Campus Navigation at Texas State| Research Blog 1
As part of an Entrepreneurial Design project, my team and I chose a challenge that would improve the campus experience for the Texas State community. We decided to work on the challenge of improving campus navigation.
Our first research step was to complete an exercise that would help us frame our challenge statement correctly in order to work toward the right solutions.
In this exercise we:
· Stated the problem we were trying to solve, “Improve navigation on the Texas State campus”
· Framed the problem as a question, “How might we navigate campus more efficiently?”
· Stated the ultimate impact we were trying to achieve, “Help the bobcat community know where they’re going.”
· Listed possible solutions to our problem, “more accessible directions, provide maps around campus, organized public transportation, and more public transportation.”
· Finally, we wrote down the constraints we were facing for this challenge, “the size of campus, crowds of people, students not having enough time to read signage.”
After we answered all of the necessary questions to find the correct challenge statement, we rephrased our original question to, “How might we provide the best resources to bobcats in order to navigate on and off campus more efficiently?”
Our goal for this exercise was to simplify our challenge statement as much as we could in order to reach the right conclusion to our challenge and discover what the real problem was.
Once we developed the right challenge question, we moved to the second step of our research, finding what “the job to be done” was. The purpose of “the jobs to be done” exercise was to discover what the real outcome of this challenge was. In order to complete this task, we asked what the “job to be done” was. After brainstorming and coming up with constraints and solutions in our previous exercise, we discovered that the “job to be done” was to “help Bobcats get around campus efficiently.”
For our next research step, we identified who our audience was. Our audience included most of the Bobcat community that have to navigate around campus. After finding out who our audience was, we developed a few interview questions as part of our primary research. Our key outcome was to make our questions as neutral and unbiased as possible, in order to let the interviewee state where they truly stand.
After receiving our survey responses for improving campus navigation, there were several problems and insights that helped us know better what to do next. Most people responded they get around campus by asking someone where to go, rather than signage or something provided by the university. This means one of our main solutions should include a signage system that helps bobcats navigate around campus. The second main thing we learned was that all of our interviewees only knew 25% of the campus or less. Lastly, most of our interviewees answered they get around mostly by foot.
As part of our secondary research we also looked up the existing Texas State navigation app and wayfinding systems. This supported our survey results and helped us learn what the main problems were and what solutions were best to fix them. The main solutions that we thought were the most important were, creating a directional signage system including a map around campus, and an app that helps you navigate campus more easily.
From gathering our primary and secondary research, we came to the conclusion that what the bobcat community needed was a wayfinding system to efficiently navigate campus. This would benefit the bobcat community by offering them access to more knowledge of resources, a better connection to campus and the community, better navigation on campus, and saving time from having to ask people or find a map to get around campus.
After identifying the job to be done and the solution needed to solve the challenge, we researched various existing solutions of navigation apps and wayfinding systems.
We eventually learned that the best wayfinding systems were easily replaceable and updateable, have a combination of icons and building names, incorporate Texas State colors as part of the branding and that they had to be in areas of high traffic.
Finally, our proposed solution for the project was to expand signage on the Texas State campus, and potentially improve the Texas State map and navigation app.
