The UoB

4 min readMar 19, 2019

Introduction

What: This is a group project when I was doing MSc Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Birmingham. This project is about the Birmingham Campus Navigation Application. We did the user research and user interface design about this app.

Why: the University of Birmingham had not an app from campus explore and navigation, so many freshmen struggle with finding lecture rooms due to the big campus. Also, google map has not provided enough accuracy in campus navigation particular in an indoor situation.

How: By doing the research, we decided to design an app for campus navigation. So we design the app The UoB.

Process and Methods

Background Research

The University of Birmingham has 30000 and students 7000 staffs and has a big campus with 100,000m2, but there no convenient solution to ensure people who can get the lecture room soon.

Existing Solution Analysis

We conducted the observation experience of finding specific lecture room and find the problem shows below:

The student usually use the Google Map to find the way but it has not much location information about buildings on the campus
The sign of the University of Birmingham is not very clear for guidance.
PDF Map of Birmingham cannot show the current location of the student.

Interview and Survey

We conducted a questionnaire survey in the Survey Monkey and interview and found some valuable points showing below:

To deal with these points, we put up some possible solution

We have two plan to solve the indoor navigation problem.
1. Using the Augmented Reality to do the visual tag recognising with the machine learning algorithm.

2. Using the Bluetooth to locate the user indoor.
There is an exiting solution called iBeacon, which can locate the user accurately indoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon

There is a significant problem we will face. When the user who became familiar with the campus, they may not need the navigation app or navigation function in the UoB.

So to solve this problem, to enhance customer stickiness/engagement, we need to provide these two kinds of information.

Valuable and Dynamic information
So we would like the design the function of unoccupied seats of each study place such as each faculty building and library.

Expand social circle
We planned to design the function of finding other students to walk with each other. But we can not search and match people randomly because few people want to go to the lecture room with an unfamiliar person. So we decided to use API with our teaching system CANVAS, which can show each module classmate.

For finding mates, we found that it is unreasonable to do it during navigated by phone, so we design the planning function to give people a function to plan and contact with mates when they have leisure time.