CIT User Experience
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The CIT, or Center for Information Technology, is a building at Brown that houses most of the Computer Science resources. I spend a lot of time at the CIT; I am a Computer Science TA, I am in many computer science classes, and I work at the IT Service Center, which was housed in the CIT last year. After spending so much time there, one would think that I might actually understand it, but I still don’t. The CIT is arguably the most confusing and frustrating building on Brown’s campus. There is a main staircase next to the entrance that only goes from floors 1 to 2. If you want to take the stairs up any more, you have to go to the other side of the building to a different staircase. The photo below (figure 1) shows a sign on the second floor of the CIT that says that the stairwell exits to floors 2–5 only. It states, “if you’re trying to get to the Sunlab or lobby or outside, use the other set of stairs,” but it doesn’t say where that set of stairs is. It looks like it used to, but then it was crossed off for unknown reasons.
Then there is a different staircase from floors 3 to 5. As you can see in the picture below (figure 2), which was taken on the third floor of the building, the staircase only goes up and doesn’t connect to the lower two floors.
The combination of staircases that don’t go from the bottom floor to the top floor makes no sense. On one hand, I understand why the main staircase only goes up one floor. The building is set up to look like building blocks, with the bottom floor jutting out more than the ones above it to create an atrium with beautiful natural light right when you walk in. Because the main staircase is in the area that juts out, I understand why it can only go up one floor. But even so, there should still be some central staircase that is easy to find that goes from the bottom floor to the top floor. Not only is it just purely frustrating on a day-to-day basis, it is also a fire hazard to have the stairs be so confusing and difficult to find.
Additionally, the room numbers don’t go in any order. If you are trying to find a room, you will find it just as quickly by randomly going from room to room than trying to figure it out based on room numbers. This is because they set up the building to look like a sort of maze, with a large central area on every floor, and then many hallways leading out of the central area and back to it in four circles. Since it consists of many hallways instead of one large surrounding hallway, there is no intuitive starting point for numbering. They wanted the building to be modern, but modern shouldn’t be more important than simple. It is more important to be able to find a room than to have a cool and complicated floor plan. While aesthetics are important, it is more important for a building to have an intuitive layout.
Because of the problems explained above, the CIT has bad learnability (if you have never been there, you will not know that the staircases don’t connect to every floor), memorability (it is so strange that even if you figure it out once, you most likely won’t remember it again), and efficiency (even if you are a CIT frequenter, it is still easy to get confused).
If I were to redesign the building, I would put the rooms in order, with even-numbered rooms on one side of the hallway, and odd-numbered rooms on the other side of the hallway. I would start the numbering on the circle around the right side of the elevator, because then you walk to the right and the numbers go up, as if you’re reading from left to right and incrementing. I have included a photo below (Figure 3) of what this renumbering would look like for floor three. In the photo, the orange diagonal lines in each corner of the central area are signs that say which room numbers are in that corner. For example, in the bottom left corner, the sign would say “rooms 334–344”. The black lines in the top left of the central area are elevators. Green represents hallway or central area.
I would also have a map next to the elevator with a floor plan of that floor so students know how to get to the room they’re looking for.
Finally, I would also create a central staircase that goes through the main lobby of the first floor and goes all the way up to the fifth floor.