Written by Madalyn O’Dea, Emily Young, Olivia Wenger, Juli Muijderman and Shan Thoo
Goals — Approach to the problem
Burnet Woods is one of Cincinnati’s oldest parks. It has 90-acres of hiking trails, a fishing lake, playgrounds and a disk golf course directly across from the University of Cincinnati. Unfortunately, the park has a stigma of being unsafe and college students are warned by upperclassmen and orientation leaders not to go there. The park is not visited by students and is viewed as shortcut in order to get to and from Ludlow street.
Our group did research on how to increase foot traffic in Burnet Woods in order to debunk the myth that Burnet Woods is unsafe. We want people to see Burnet Woods as a destination. As a group of five, we each did research online and travelled to the park in person. We targeted college students specifically from the University of Cincinnati, hoping to increase the foot traffic of this existing audience. Since social media is a main form of communication amongst college students, we created a survey to post on our Instagram and Snapchat stories asking our followers about Burnet woods as well as highlights about parks they enjoyed going to. In gathering information, it was implied that Burnet Woods was in fact perceived as unsafe. With this in mind, we looked into what amenities or activities other parks offer and what makes those parks desirable.
Method — User research
Google Research
After determining our goal for this project, we began the user research process. We began by doing Google searches about Burnet Woods. We read reviews left by users of the woods in hopes of finding out more intimate details about the daily users. Many users shared how it was a lovely park to walk through or have a picnic. From the Google reviews, we were also able to gauge the most frequent time frames people visit the park. The times with the most activity seemed to be from 4pm to 8pm, proving that the visits to Burnet Woods being fairly short.
Observations
A few of us made visits to the park at various times and days of the week. We were hoping to do in person interviews but unfortunately that didn’t work out. Although this, visiting the park gave us a better understanding of what users feel and experience as they visit the park. Visiting the park in the evening as sunset neared, we noted that the park became scarce with activity. It quickly became dark as the sun went down and instantly highlighted the lack of street lights throughout the park.
Survey
Moving forward with our research, we developed a Google Form (survey). We decided to make a digital survey because it is the easiest way to get the most information, in a timely manner. Additionally, our target audience were college students, hence having a platform we can share through social media was a must. The survey proved to be very successful!
Majority of responses said they visited Burnet Wood’s to either walk or run through it, spending less than an hour in the park. On the flip side, we asked the users about other parks they visited, asking what makes it their favorite and how much time they spend in them. Most users mentioned that their favorite parks were clean and safe, with the average spending 1–2 hours in those parks. That is twice as much time in other parks than they said they would spend at Burnet Woods. This proved our suspicions that users do not spend a lot of time in the park and hence fuelled our research.
Users also agreed that Burnet Wood’s is considered sometimes safe, saying it is only not safe when it is dark. The majority of users agreed that improving the lighting was necessary. Additionally, users advised an increase in scheduled events and activities, like hosting a Farmer’s Market, food truck days, and having hammock hookup spots. Since our target audience is college kids, increasing the amount of interactive activities and events would draw more visitors and increase the amount of time spent at the park. Having events and activities would also improve the perception of the park. With more people seen visiting and interacting within Burnet Woods, the environment would provide better perceptions and push others to follow their footsteps.
Insights — Analyze the data
How did we analyse and process the findings from our research?
For this section of the project, we started by going over all our primary and secondary research once again. There were a lot of interesting and surprising findings, but a few in specific that stuck with us and we would like to focus on. Our research shows a mix of positive and negative feedback. In this section we will analyse all these findings step by step.
Affinity diagram
All the information we gathered during our research phase allowed us to organize and use our findings via an affinity diagram to guide us through this section of the project.
Personas and scenarios
We created three different personas and scenarios based upon our earlier research findings. We used both personas and scenarios to fully understand our users needs.
Persona 1
Chad is in a fraternity at UC and loves to play sport after class such as frisbee, soccer or spike ball with his friends. Unsure of where to find a space outside university, he mainly plays on campus. With the lack of information, Chad doesn’t know that Burnet Woods has disk golf. He also wants to invite his friends but has a hard time convincing them to come because many of his friends are girls and they heard it is unsafe to go at dusk.
Persona 2
Jenna is a recent international student at the University of Cincinnati. At the age of 21, she loves to read, write, and plays music whenever she can. She has a bubbly personality and likes to chat to anyone she meets. Jenna is a hard-working, independent student with a goal to make the most of her time at UC enjoyable. She has further plans to travel around the world after graduating.
As it’s her first year in Cincinnati, Jenna has been trying to familiarize herself with the campus’s surroundings whether it’s places to eat or somewhere to relax. Noticing that the environment is quite industrial, she asks her friends for recommendations for relatively friendly parks she can go to when she wants to exercise. She hears about Burnet Woods from the other international students in class and was told not to go there when it’s too late, but was told that it’s quite a pleasant place to go for a walk and run during the day.
Persona 3
Michelle, a motivated 19 year-old DAAP student, loves art and naturally instils creativity in her everyday life. Studying Fine Arts at UC, she dreams of becoming a well-known artist and has aspirations to start her own gallery. She currently has a student job at DAAP, working in the communication design department. Michelle deeply cares about the environment, and uses her art to create much awareness over the constantly arising global issues the world faces. She hates seeing litter thrown and tries to join clean-up events with her friends.
Being a nature-oriented person, Michelle routinely goes on walks through Burnet Woods and likes to watch people fish or kayak. In this time, she spends it recreationally painting aspects of the park and draws on this place for inspiration when she’s hit road-blocks in her work. Burnet Woods is great for taking a quick walk from DAAP to get some air and to refresh her creativity. She however observes that It’s normally quite empty and that people only stay for 30–45 minutes in the park before leaving.
Mental models
To understand our users a little more in depth we looked into mental models to decipher what our user’s would be thinking when using the park. It is crucial in noting the way our users plan their actions within a system to come up with the best recommendations for Burnet Woods.
Use: What makes people visit Burnet Woods?
- Events
- Relaxing with friends
- Dog walking
- Walking through the park to go from A to B
- Hiking
- Working out
- Fishing
- Friends and family gatherings
- School trips
Awareness: How do people know about Burnet Woods?
- Social media
- Friends or family
- Reviews
- Event advertisement
Safety: What makes people feel unsafe in Burnet Woods?
- Poor lightning
- Stories from others
- Homeless people hanging around
- It’s quiet as there are not a lot of people around
We noticed that the mental models differed for each user of Burnet Woods. For our specific target audience though, the mental models were quite similar. Most college students are familiar with Burnet Woods, either through social media or friends. Most of them only visit the park when working out or to get to and from Ludlow to MLK, mostly because of unsafe feelings and people discouraging them to go there.
Task analysis
Our observations in Burnet Woods helped to teach us a lot about our users and allowed us to come up with a task analysis that shows in detail how our users visit Burnet Woods. We picked two of the most common task analysis.
Task Analysis 1
1. Walking back home with friends after a day at school
2. Looking for somewhere to relax for a bit
3. Wanting to be outdoors after being inside the entire day
4. Enters the park
5. There a few to none lights
6. It gets dark early (since it’s November)
7. Leaves Burnet Woods because it is too dark to play a game
Task Analysis 2
1. A group of girls want to go for a picnic in the sunny weather
2. They know about Burnet Woods through Facebook
3. They prepare lunch and decide to go to Burnet Woods
4. They are having trouble parking the car
5. After they have found a parking spot they are looking for a picnic spot
6. Once settled, homeless people come up to the them to ask for money
7. They don’t feel a 100% comfortable and decide to leave
Recommendations — Report your results
In order to attract more visitors to Burnet Woods, we suggest that the Cincinnati Parks Board focus on solutions pertaining to the safety and reputation of the park, since most people avoid it because they consider it unsafe. One possible solution could be adding more lighting throughout the park. Extra lights would add a feeling of safety to visitors since there is not much existing lighting at Burnet, so as soon as dusk comes around, they start to feel unsafe. This also limits the amount of time people can enjoy the park if they feel they need to leave quickly before it gets dark, so by adding more lighting, visitors might stay longer.
Additionally, many UC students hear of Burnet Woods’ “unsafe” reputation from upperclassmen or on orientation tours. Instead of making new students scared to go to the park, orientation leaders could pass out Burnet Woods buttons or stickers, spreading awareness and encouraging them to visit the park.
Finally, Burnet Woods could host more activities to attract college students. For example, students could hang their hammocks in the park, or there could be a day once a week when food trucks are stationed in the park. This would encourage people to stop by and spend time there, and possibly tell their friends or come back again.
Our takeaway from this project is that Burnet Woods can be an enjoyable place to visit, however people don’t take the time to explore it because they believe it’s unsafe or that there’s nothing to do there. Though this, there are various small solutions that could get more people to go. We learned how to conduct successful research through different methods such as interviewing, observing, taking surveys, etc. for a real problem and come up with user centered solutions based on that research that could work in real life. Next time, something we might do differently is considering wider or different audiences than just college students to see how different solutions might work for different types of people.
