For the codesign workshop (Project 2), I worked with the team to:
For the website solution (Project 1), I worked with:
There’s no comprehensive map for the 200+ gender neutral bathrooms at Purdue. Because of this, wayfinding for gender neutral restrooms is very troublesome, often requiring students to rely on unclear paper signs with directions, word of mouth/memory, or look at a long list of all of the gender neutral bathrooms on the LGBTQ+ center website.
This makes many people who only feel comfortable in gender neutral bathrooms use gendered bathrooms where they face dysphoria and harassment from other students or simply not use campus bathrooms at all.
Our first goal is to gather our user group’s pain points and insights about gender neutral bathrooms on campus to guide a future design solution.
After that, our second goal is to use research and codesign workshop insights to create a web-based and mobile site that displays the necessary information about the nearest gender-inclusive bathroom in a quick and intuitive manner.
*Gender neutral or gender-inclusive bathrooms are bathrooms that are ADA compliant and accessible and open to any gender for use.
The project’s description was to create a web-based solution for a local community: we decided to work with Purdue LGBTQ+ center.
Areas that we could focus on were pulled from team members’ interviews with people who worked there about what problems they faced and what improvements could be made. Based on the interview, there were many opportunities for us to design web solutions. To organize the potential areas, we collaboratively worked on an affinity diagram.
We eventually narrowed it down to one solution: creating a comprehensive web-based map of gender neutral bathrooms as that led to a clear, straightforward solution with a narrow and important user group.
The current solution at Purdue for locating gender neutral bathrooms is: Refuge Restrooms which is a fully realized app with most of the functionality we were looking for: map with pinned locations on it, comments on each bathroom from the users, general locations of all the gender neutral bathrooms in a list format.
However, there is much room for improvement and isn’t too helpful for actually using it to find bathrooms.
There were little to no users and very few of the restrooms actually pinned on the map. As a result:
Moreover, while the list format did have symbols/tags for each restroom indicating accessibility, there were no filters for these tags and missing tags for menstrual products that other universities’ solutions included.
Although we were researching the importance of GN bathrooms and comparing the current solutions on our own, none of our team was part of the community we wanted to design with: people who prefer using GN bathrooms over gendered ones. For this project to succeed, we needed to talk with and get ideas from that community via a codesign workshop.
We wanted any design decisions to be based on the community members’ stories and design suggestions.
To encourage participants in telling their stories and have good conversations, we came up with more open-ended questions along with a task of them sketching their own design.
While we wanted and encouraged all designs, we recognized that some participants may not feel comfortable sketching ideas, so we also allowed for them to just write down features they would want on the post-it notes.
Due to time limitations of the project and our own team’s schedules(we all wanted to be there in person to conduct the workshop and take notes), it was conducted on one day for 90 minutes.
To make people joining us feel more comfortable with the codesign experience, especially people who may be unfamiliar with UXD or design in general, we let people come in and go anytime. In total, we had 9 community members show up, but only a few people were there for the whole workshop, others leaving earlier or coming in late.
The first part of the codesign workshop in identifying problems from a community lens was very enlightening in showing the importance of developing a system for locating gender neutral bathrooms.
Some notable quotes that were:
Participants from our codesign workshop gave us more reasons it was difficult for them to find gender neutral bathrooms, such as:
The workshop was especially insightful as our participants gave us many design suggestions and areas of improvement we could design around in GN bathrooms, both on post-its and during the conversation.
Suggestions that we included when developing our website were:
Taking the areas of improvement from both our codesign workshop and competitive analysis we found in Purdue and other universities, we created mid-fidelity prototypes on Figma to come up with possible UIs that would be the best solution. This was done quickly in order to get group critique by other teams during this project.
We started out with a web prototype that was easier to ideate for before also creating a phone/mobile prototype as that’s what students would most likely be using to find restrooms. We also kept a checklist of the features we wanted to include that we got from the codesign in order to make sure it could really cater to our user group.
After getting feedback on our prototypes by other teams of student UX Designers and members of our user group, we came back as a team to make changes.
One major insight we got from user testing was that some of the features in the sidebar were unnecessary and cluttered, such as the star rating in the user reviews section, so we removed them.
We also added directions to the bathroom detail sections to make location even clearer.
On the web version, we moved the filters to the top of the screen so the map and restroom icons would be the main focus.
We also added interactivity to the mobile screens by making the bar with additional information swipeable. We did this because the main focus should be on the restroom icons and wayfinding rather than additional (helpful, but not necessary) building information.
After our redesigns, we handed them over to another team member for coding the final website.
