theShaft
Role: Product Designer
Team: Myself, Muchen Guo (Head of Product), Pru Yontrarak (Product Manager), Ethan Xu (Product Manager), Polly Arnan (Product Designer), Sarah Alsharif (Product Designer)
Tools: Figma
Duration: September 2023 - Present
Project Overview
In this project, our team redesigned the individual dorm pages for theShaft, a product of Columbia Daily Spectator that assists students in gaining a comprehensive understanding of housing options on campus. Our primary objective is to integrate a 360 room tour feature that would offer immersive experience when viewing the campus dorms, in order to better aid students make informed housing decisions.
This project is ongoing.
Pain Points
We recognized that some of the pain points of the current website included:
- Inadequate view of room
- Incorrect layout sizing
- Outdated reviews
Research
In our research, we mainly focused on the first pain point.
To gain a better understanding of how to approach the redesign, we conducted a comparative analysis of other universities’ dorm websites to explore how they allowed students to view their prospective dorms. Some examples include photos with panoramic views, real-life floor plans, videos, and interactive room tours.
After conducting a comprehensive analysis, we presented our findings to randomly sampled Columbia University students through a short interview. This interview enabled us to ascertain the efficacy of our identified features and also to gain valuable insights into the students' interaction patterns with other online platforms, thereby informing our decision-making process regarding feature inclusion and exclusion.
The main conclusions are as follows:
- Users prefer simplistic design features that are intuitive; less is more
- Users would rather see their room in a separate, full screen tab if utilizing the 360 room tour or video
- Users prefer if we stick to one type of multimedia
- Managing board decided that although 360 room tour would be most ideal for the students, the current budget does not support it
Design Opportunities
- Video Room Tour: Students can play a video of their choice of dorm in a separate, full screen tab to explore spaces that photos cannot otherwise depict. The full screen tab will have a small drop down menu for users to choose which room they would like to see.
- Layout Resizing: We will re-do the layout so that students can now see entire photos or features without having to scroll. This would help the readability and comprehension of the website.
