I worked on a project for a class on service design that aimed to find a problem apparent on Stanford campus, explore the problem space, and develop a solution that addressed key insights around that problem. My partner and I worked on space reservation. Through conducting need-finding interviews with students, faculty and admin heavily involved in space reservation, we found that the current ecosystem is heavily decentralized—the main platform, a service called 25Live, is not nimble enough to accommodate every department’s specific reservation flows, forcing these departments to break away from the main tool and create their own systems, whether those be Google forms, links on websites, or other tools. This decentralization is already overwhelming to navigate, but because there is no centralized hub of information, finding these resources without insider knowledge is nearly impossible. The reservation process was also not transparent in telling students why they don’t have access to certain spaces and how they might obtain access to spaces. Lastly, the UI of 25Live, which still holds the majority of spaces on campus is not user-friendly.

To address all of these insights, we created a prototype of an app that would act as a centralized one-stop shop, pulling rooms from all of these sites to one large database. Moreover, the reservation process on the app was student-facing, with an emphasis on action-based UI that asked the most basic question—what activity are you planning for?

From there, we added pre-populated filters that were apt for the activity chosen and displayed the rooms free at the event time. In room details, we show the features the room has, any policies that the owners of the room put in place, and information on how you have access to a space. When you reserve a room, the app will tell you how it is sending the request and the information it will use for the request. Check out a demo below!