Narwhal Noted* is a mobile application hosted by the New School to enable students and community members in New York City to reserve music spaces within the new center.
Design Prompt
The New School and Parsons School of Design built a new student center and need to design a reservation experience for students, professors and community members to check availability and reserve one of the music rehearsal spaces within the new center.
Role
Individual project, in charge of all aspects. This project was an exercise to be completed in 10 hours and take no longer than 1 week.
Research Preparation
In order to understand the full scope of a problem, I start with an exercise that helps me explore the topic, such as a mind map. From there, I start to see some patterns, areas of interest, or different buckets of research to conduct. This helps me plan the appropriate research approach.
User research: stakeholder landscape
Though limited in time, it was very important for me understand the stakeholder landscape for the potential application and then talk to individuals that could serve as potential users of this tool.
User Interviews & Industry Research
Interviewed a New School Musician who reserves music spaces. In addition to the user research and interviews, I also conducted a brief secondary research search on current New School policies on renting/reserving space, availability of music spaces in New York City, and other space reserving applications/services. While not competitors, it was helpful to understand where there might be gaps and opportunity areas.
Persona Drafting
My interviews and research brought me to hone in on two key personas for this design exercise. I drafted their goals, challenges, and priorities are to keep as an anchor through the rest of my process.
Critical User Journey Map
I synthesized the user interviews and persona drafts in a common case journey map for the critical user, which is the New School Student. This user goes through a long arduous process both internally and externally to look for space. This journey results in three key takeaways that I highlighted while whiteboarding.
User Question Sorting
An important part of my design process is to organize and think about solutions based on questions that the user asks. Organizing questions in the way that the user makes decisions and looks for answers helps inform my user flow and user experience.
Sketches
My sketch concept consisted of whiteboarding out a few flows and layouts to see what would make the most sense for the two users identified. I followed my whiteboard sketches with a quick tablet sketch to add in any detail and make it a bit more clear before I iterated into wireframes.
Medium Fidelity Wireframes
After getting to a good flow with my sketch wireframes, I moved into prototyping with medium fidelity wireframe. Below are the two paths and experiences for the users, highlighting and accounting for slight differences in UX/UI for each.
High Fidelity Wireframes
UI elements are informed by The New School’s branding guidelines. I decided to create the landing page and the results page because they represented important elements for the UI including, visual identity, layout and structure, and key functionality
