LOOkout - Look For a LOO Near You

Team

Chloe Fong	Albert Yeh	Anju Lam	Jinwen Tian

Problem & Design Overview

The problem we identified is that navigating the UW campus for suitable bathrooms is challenging due to the lack of information on bathroom features, maintenance status, and supply availability, making it difficult to meet diverse needs and preferences.

The design we chose was guided by a few tasks that we found were most challenging for our target audience of regulars visitors to UW, as well as tourists/strangers to the campus. As explained in the following sections, we decided to create a website that allows users to find nearby bathrooms that suits their needs and displays information about the bathrooms' resources and status, and also has a maintenance-facing interface which allows maintenance workers to more easily lay out a list of bathrooms that need maintenance and the information about the issue.

The front page of our website for users to find bathrooms

Design Research Process

In the design research, our objective was to gain a nuanced understanding of how a small, yet diverse group of users interacted with the system we are developing. We focused our interviews on four individuals: two tourists and two students. By employing semi-structured interviews, we were able to explore these specific needs in depth, allowing for a rich dialogue that uncovered detailed insights into their experiences. This method proved invaluable, as it not only addressed our predefined questions but also adapted to the emergent concerns of our participants. The insights from these interviews are instrumental in guiding the next steps of our design process, ensuring that the system we develop is attuned to the real-world needs and preferences of our users.

A tourist is seeking for diaper station	A student needs more paper towel

Key Insights

Difficulty In Finding Specific Resources

Through our design research we found that almost all participants found it difficult and frustrating to find bathrooms with a specific resource that they might need, including menstrual products, fully enclosed stalls, and baby changing tables.

"Because my child is young, I need to use a changing table frequently but it's inconvenient since not every restroom has one. It's a problem if I can’t find one because this process is urgent and can only be done while she's laying down." - A female tourist who has special needs.

We chose to center our design based on this insight since it was the most prevalent and prominent. We made it a priority to make sure users had the ability to easily search for bathrooms with their desired features. While we don't have a specific feature to navigate users to the exact location, our design makes sure to point a user to a bathroom, which they can then navigate to using other existing GPS services.

Differing Priorities When Navigating Bathrooms

While some people prioritize distance over availability of resources, some people strongly preferred bathrooms that are clean and private. Taking this research insight, we decided to design our tool in a way that provides as much information as possible about a bathroom, so that users can make informed decisions based on their priorities. Providing dynamic information to users such as the cleanliness and availability of features meant that we needed a way to get this information. This inspired our design to include a feature where users can leave reviews about a bathroom after they use it, providing information that others can benefit from through a simple process.

Strong Desire For Knowing Bathroom Cleanliness:

We also found that participants valued cleanliness in a bathroom and felt strongly about it. |"The bathroom has to be clean. If it smells or looks bad, I leave immediately”. They wished there was a way to check the state of a bathroom before actually going inside." - A male student with ADHD who frequents the CSE buildings| |-|

This led us to realize that having a design that maintenance staff could also use would be beneficial because they would be able to provide and display cleaning updates through our tool, which the user would then be able to see about each bathroom. We made it so that users can not only see the most recently cleaned time for each bathroom, but they can also sort their preferences based on the last cleaned time of a bathroom, if this was a strong priority for them. We then expanded the maintenance facing part of our design so that users could now report any issues that could be received and acted on from the maintenance side. | | |:--:| |The attention required page from maintenance side of our website |

Iterative Design Process

Tasks

The tasks that we chose to focus on were:

• Finding the closest bathroom with the user’s desired features (user side)
• Reviewing bathrooms & reporting any issues (user side)
• Viewing and resolving reported issues (maintenance side)
• Submitting real-time cleaning updates (maintenance side)

These goals were chosen from the accounts by participants from our research stage, as their most pressing concerns about finding bathrooms is that it is hard to find bathrooms that have their specific needs and wants. We also found that being able to communicate the status and concerns about each bathroom to the maintenance workers and management of maintenance was a priority for participants as well.

Iteration Process

In this design, we conducted an iterative design process that included paper prototyping, usability testing, and heuristic evaluation. Our team identified key heuristic violations such as Visibility, Control & Freedom, Flexibility & Efficiency, and Error Recovery. We addressed these by making explicit the precedence of desired features over preferred factors, enhancing navigation with clear backspace options, and providing direct access to report issues. These improvements were validated through usability testing with participants representative of our target audience, including students and maintenance staff, in the CSE2 lab.

We observed and recorded each participant’s interaction with the prototype, noting their actions and feedback. This approach revealed valuable insights, such as the need for a search bar for maintenance workers to update cleaning statuses remotely, and the preference for simple, intuitive layouts. Additionally, we incorporated a ‘recently cleaned’ sorting option to align with user expectations set by the initial search functionality.

Our revised prototype now offers a more seamless and efficient user experience, with clearly defined tasks and enhanced error recovery mechanisms. Going forward, we will continue refining our design through further usability testing, focusing on the new features and seeking feedback from fresh participants who have not been involved in previous testing phases."

Key Insights

Maintain Common Design Conventions

When designing the UI of our website, many of the sorting options of bathroom listings used square selection bubbles rather than radio-like bubbles. By keeping with common design conventions, we greatly reduced confusion for users.

Before

After

Keep Elements Consistent Between Versions of the Same Design

In our design, we have two different screens where users can search bathroom listings (one in the regular user facing side, and one on the maintenance worker facing side). When either user looks at the bathroom listing corresponding to their side of the website, there were different sorting options available to them that should have been present in both designs. By ensuring the sorting options were the same, the maintenance facing users were able to more easily know how to use the pages in the way that they wanted as they were familiar with the other page.

Before

After

Ensure Navigation Flows Well and Gives a High Degree Of Freedom

We found that by adding more navigation buttons and ensuring that each page has a back button, we could give the user a higher degree of freedom and reduced confusion in navigating our website, as they were able to ensure that they were at the right page and that they were able to go back to a page if they made a mistake on the previous page.

Before

After

Resulting Design

Task 1: Finding Bathrooms with Specific Resources and Leaving Feedback.

- Finding a Bathroom with Specific Resources
Users are recommended a bathroom after selecting their desired features and choosing their preferred sorting factor. Users are able to see more details about the bathroom to decide if that's the one they want to choose.

- Reviewing Bathrooms and Reporting Issues
Users are able to review a bathroom after they use it based on things like cleanliness and spaciousness. They are also able to verify that the features mentioned were actually present. They are also able to report problems about a bathroom to alert the maintenance team, by providing relevant context and pictures.

Task 2: Resolving Issues and Submitting Cleaning Updates

- Resolving Issues and Submitting Updates
In the alert resolving page, maintenance staff are able to see the list of all bathrooms with alerts or filter them. The maintenance staff are able to see the detail of reported problems, and are able to mark when the problem is resolved.

- Viewing Assigned Bathroom Tasks and Submitting Cleaning Updates
Each maintenance staff member is able to use this screen to organize their work, and can see their assigned bathroom locations and submit cleaning updates.