Syllabus v3.0 20210127

ADS 560 / VISC 525, Designing Digital Products, Spring 2021
Tuesday / Thursday @ 3:20-5:50pm
Matt Kirkland / mattk@ku.edu / Zoom Link

Desk Reservations

In this project, we will design a tool for on-demand desk assignments at a large company. Your solution will need to accomodate desk reservations, travel, in-person searches, and other user requests. The solution will have two user levels with different functional requirements. Your design will need to complement a large existing brand.

We will follow a similar process as the Inventory project, but this time you'll know what you're doing.

Your Client

Your client is a Fortune 500 company: you'll get to pick one. Choose one that you want to design for: either because they have something interesting going on with their brand, or compelling design assets to work with, or maybe you have some personal affinity for a specific corporation, weirdo.

Here's a list of the Fortune 500 to choose from.

The Problem

Your client (Fortune 500 Company X) is moving to a new office model: staff will not have assigned desks, but instead can reserve a desk at any location the company has. This allows more staff to telecommute and work from home, encourages collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas, and gives the staff freedom to work from different locations around the globe without needing a formal transfer. It's better for the environment if people commute less. Plus it saves the company money on real estate (that's the real reason).

Your task is to design a Desk Reservation system. Propose and prototype a new system that allows staff to book their desk location for one or more days. Let staff find where their colleagues will be working. Who knows what else? We'll talk about the problem and propose a set of solutions.

You will only need to design for end-users. No management or reporting views needed here.

Requirements

  • You are designing for at least 20 office locations, spread across at least 4 countries. You don't have to reference the actual locations of your client company unless you choose to.
  • Your offices have many floors!
  • Use these actual floor plans for reference: One, Two, Three. You cannot make up your own simplified floor plans.
  • Your design should accomodate mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Start thinking in systems, not instances.
  • Your final prototype will built for a fixed device size but you will need to provide a few alternate screens for other device sizes.
  • Your design should accomodate these user stories at minimum.

Deliverables

Just like with the Inventory project, we'll go step-by-step through specific design deliverables that get us closer to an interactive system to solve our client's problem. We'll discuss each deliverable before we start, but this will include:

  • Problem Discovery, User Stories
  • Loose concept sketches (Hand-drawn)
  • Loose Wireframe Prototype
  • Guerilla User Testing
  • Tight Wireframes Prototype
  • Guerilla User Testing
  • Mockups & Prototype (Designed in Figma)