Soap & Solutions is an interactive web experience that strives to solve the issue of miscommunication and broken machines in the Purdue residence hall’s laundry rooms.

Project Overview

Purdue’s laundry system is riddled with issues, including those regarding machines as seen above. Machines are often out of order, or often all in use at choice times. However, the current method of communicating machine status is word of mouth or written notes. This is not only inefficient, but costly for users, in terms of time and money. Our design process involved:

1. Background research to identify a user group
2. Interviewing members of the identified user group to understand pain points
3. Conducting competitive analysis on rival school’s laundry systems
4. Creating mock ups and ideating
5. Conducting co-design
6. Coding a responsive web experience
7. Presenting our findings and ideating the web experience

Identifying a user group

• Our first step was to identify our target user group.
• After idenfitying potential stakeholders of the laundry mechanics department and the current IT team for Purdue’s laundry system, we decided to not choose them since we could not get into contact with them for an interview.
• Our final, prioritized focus landed on Purdue students who live in residence halls and do laundry there.
• We then set out to interview 10 students who have experienced the laundry system.

Interviews

• The focus of my team’s interviews was to gain an understanding of the current user experience with the laundry system.
• We wanted to find out what does and does not work in the laundry system.
• In additon to asking about their experience, we asked users for their input on some potential new features we had created.
• The top 3 key pain-points we identified for Purdue students were:

1. Availability - Students were left to guess when laundry machines were available for use.
2. Refunds - Many students used faulty machines and the process to get a refund took too long
3. Fix-its - In addition to getting a refund, students had to go through the same tedious steps to file for a machine to be fixed.

       Snippet of the interview protocol created my team and I

Storyboarding and competitive analysis

In addition to interviews, my team also began our first storyboarding, which started a discussion about other possible features of the Starship. After this, my team did some more research using Google Scholar and Purdue Libraries. The findings from our search reinforced the core ideas about how our starship would work and made us think about issues we needed to address.

Lofi, Hifi, and usability testing

• Our final step was to present to the class the storyboards and journey map as well as the new ideas we gained from activities and secondary research.
• The final design for our Parking Spot Reservation Starship took into account all of the feedback we had received from peers and interviewees. We believe that the Parking Spot Reservation Starship would be an effective use for the Starships and could help to address the parking issues on campus.
• If my group was to move forward with this idea, our next step would be to contact Purdue parking as well as the owners of the Starship on campus and pitch our idea to them.

Presentation

Copy%20of%20FinalGroup2_project2_slides_Parekh-Kruppe-Carter-Ahn-compressed.pdf

These slides are my group’s final presentation describing our process and final result.

Documentation