Over the course of one week, my team and I conducted contextual inquiry interviews with 8 students in order to gain an in depth understanding of the students' experiences with navigating the UM campus. Each contextual inquiry interview lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of observing the the interviewee in their natural or routine environment while asking them questions.

View interview guide here.

• Most participating students say that digital map services are the go-to tools to help them travel to campus location and they do not have a problem with this process. But they report to struggle with finding their way and resources, such as stairs, floor plans, or restrooms, within the campus buildings when navigating without a digital guide.
• Interviewed students report having to look up campus building abbreviations is "an additional step" to them.
• Most participating students declare walking as their primary way of traveling when on central campus. To commute between central and north campus, interviewed students with a car drive, while students who don't own a car take the M-Bus (which is sponsored by the school.)

To summarize the findings from the contextual inquiry interviews, my team and I coded qualitative data (quotes and notes) from the interview transcripts into I-statements. We then grouped the I-statements by themes on Miro board collaboratively and made the following affinity diagram.

• Majority of interviewed students report that they feel frustrated by the visibility and the readability of the floor plans provided by the university in campus buildings.
• A few interviewed students say that they'd like to have more direction aides at each entrance or an existing app to guide them inside campus building, with the reasons of "to know which entrance to enter the building that is closest to the classroom" and "to have step by step guidance."
• Taking the M-Bus is an integral part of many participating students’ daily experience.
• When navigating inside campus buildings without a map or guide, participating students often resort to following the pattern of room numbers or asking for help from other people to find their desired destination.

To further investigate what we found during the contextual inquiries and to expand the research onto a wider audience, my team and I decided to send out a Google Forms survey to 26 students. The survey contained 15 questions and would take about 5-10 minutes to complete.

View survey questions here.

• Despite ranking finding locations within the campus building as the most difficult navigation category, most survey participants still say that they manage to find their desired location under a reasonable amount of time as 19 out of 26 participants say that when looking for a new location, they can find it within the time they expect.
• When asked about the usefulness of navigation resources, majority of the surveyed students respond that the digital map services on their phones are the most helpful, while they cite their asking their friends as a close second.
• Overall, surveyed students are confident with their ability to navigate on campus. 25 out of 26 surveyed students say that they feel confident or very confident navigating to a location they have been before, and 18 out of 26 students say they feel confident or very confident traveling to a location they have never been before.

As a final step of UX research, my team and I synthesized results from two survey questions for each of following data visualizations and produced the diagrams with Google Sheets and Canva.

• Surveyed students list reading maps and signs as the most useful navigation tool while inside a U of M building, and list list asking for help from other people as the most useful navigation resources for traveling to other on-campus locations.
• Students who are confident (9 participants) with navigation tend to spend the same or less than expected amount of time when finding a new location while students who are not very confident (4 participants) tend to spend about the same or more than expected time.
• An overwhelming majority of students use Google Maps or Apple Maps, and some people use both. Google Maps is slightly more popular with 15 out of 26 users while Apple Maps has 13 out of 26 users from survey results. 

Looking back at the 10 weeks researching and designing process, I had lots to learn from, especially during the research phase. I really appreciated the hands-on opportunity of designing a survey and coming up with interview questions myself with my team. In retrospect, I think my team and I did a good job with presenting our findings and I believe that the app solutions do also reflect our findings. However, if I could do the research again, I would design and phrase many of the survey questions differently with less ambiguity.

• Survey question options should match what the question is asking for - In survey questions 4 and 13, my team and I asked the survey participants to rank the most useful options given a scenario. Our provided answer format to these respective questions let the participants vote on whether each option is, "Not useful," "Somewhat useful," "Useful," and "Very useful." Since my team and I are looking for the most useful option instead of investigating in the varying degree of usefulness of each option, the survey results generated made it difficult for us to decipher the results to produce effective findings.
  
  For example in question 13, for the option of "Reading maps or signs on the wall" received the most "Very useful" votes out of all options (9 out of 26) while option "Follow room numbers" received the most "Useful" votes (19 out of 26.) So which of the two is the most useful when the participant couldn't find a room? We don't know! Currently, the way the question is designed allowed plenty of room for speculation. And if I were to redo question 13, I would have the participants choose the singular most useful option instead.
• Demographics may not be the most representative factor in designing a user persona - Race, ethnicity, age, and other visible demographics criteria are often not enough to represent a persona. Making demographics a part of the user persona also carries an implicit bias and may cause the designer to rule out potential users who don't fit the criteria.
  
  My team initially had demographics data in one of the user personas that we made. After much discussion and consideration, we had taken those data out as we believe that the user personas should represent the user's behaviors, mental models, pain points, and motivations, instead of simply labeling the personas with demographics data that make inference on how the user actually behaves and thinks.