The homepage of the Ryerson Hangouts concept app.
An introduction to the SLC, one of the study spaces available at Ryerson.
A more in-depth look at the SLC.
Ryerson Hangouts is an app concept developed by myself and a group of peers as part of a design thinking exercise undertaken in a course called Creativity, Clients and Design. The purpose of the exercise was to identify a problem being faced within the Ryerson community or Toronto at large and use design thinking to ideate and prototype a potential solution.
My group and I initially decided to focus our efforts on the issue of overcrowding at Ryerson’s Student Learning Centre (SLC), as being Ryerson students ourselves, this was a problem we had all encountered. However, after surveying a larger group of students and speaking with SLC employees, my group and I realized that the underlying issue we needed to address for our project was the inefficient use of space on campus at Ryerson. We found that students thought that the SLC was often too busy for them to find a place to study or do work between classes, but did not have a good sense of what an alternative study space could be for them.
To address this issue, my group and I generated a variety of potential solutions: adding additional floors to the SLC to provide extra seating, renovating older buildings on campus to make them more desirable study spots, finding a way to notify students of vacant classrooms that could be used as temporary study locations. Ultimately, though, we decided that our primary solution would be the Ryerson Hangouts app. The app, which I originally proposed to my group, would be a way for students to quickly and easily discern which buildings on campus have study spaces available and which ones are already at capacity. Within the app, students would be shown a heat map of the Ryerson campus, with “hotter” spots being those that were busiest at that given time. By clicking on or searching for a location, students would be provided with a more in-depth look at the building, including a brief description of it, user ratings of it, and user reviews. Using Ryerson Hangouts, students would also be able to report in real-time how busy a location is (similar to the traffic app, Waze, which allows users to report accidents or congestion) so that the app would always be up-to-date with the most timely and relevant information possible.
The Ryerson Hangouts app was designed to work in conjunction with several supplementary solutions: interactive maps on campus with the same user interface as the app, live updates to the SLC website by the building’s employees who do regular sweeps of its floors (which would also be reported to the Hangouts app), and renovations to older/more run-down spaces across campus to make them more appealing study spots for students. The paper prototype of the app (featured below) was well-received by our peers, and I used the feedback they provided to later design the digital user flow of the app pictured above.
A heat map overview of the Ryerson campus
A list view of the Ryerson campus
A more in-depth look at a the SLC
An additional option on the SLC website to track study spaces
A floor-by-floor look at the study spaces available on each floor of the SLC
An example of the public interactive map interface
