Update: Google approved of my design exercise! Unfortunately, positions were being removed as COVID-19 hit.
Chosen Prompt: Prompt #1
Your school wants to improve the upkeep of campus facilities by creating a new system for reporting any facilities that may need maintenance or repair. Design an experience that allows students to report building or equipment issues on campus. Consider the process of those filing the report and of those receiving and taking action on the issues.
Why I picked this design exercise
When reading the first prompt, I immediately felt motivated to create an app that was simple, seamless and easily usable when in a hurry.
At Starbucks (my previous employer of 6+ years), we used to have to call in maintenance requests. I always imagined that an app could reduce maintenance time, response time, and even technician travel time (many technicians would come to the store only to leave to pick up a part). In addition, when placing a call to our maintenance technicians, we would have to answer a series of automated prompts to connect us to the correct department, then we would be put on hold from 5 to 40 minutes to finally speak with a technician.
The process was long and for that reason, many supervisors, including myself, simply did not have that kind of time and would wait until much later to finally call in an issue. Calling in an issue could even be delayed by a couple days if someone forgot to communicate an issue before leaving the store.
With an app, a coffee shop or a university could potentially greatly reduce its maintenance response time, completion time, and have a greater overview of the company’s maintenance needs.
Research
First, I thought about this app’s nature, its audience, and the user's needs.
Students would need the app to submit maintenance requests for their dorm rooms, campus restrooms, study areas, or even vending machines. It would probably be in the university’s best interest to limit what a student could submit a ticket for and allow faculty or staff to submit requests. Here are some of the reasons why:
Potential for an incredible number of duplicate requests for the same issue.
Students probably should notify their professor if something is broken in a classroom, skipping this step could create communication gaps between professors and their students. If an appliance broke in the dining hall, someone should notify their supervisor so that everyone is aware of the issue. The supervisor could then submit the request just as easily and quickly.
It might be too big of a responsibility to give students.
Students might frequent different areas as the university’s faculty and staff.
Students might not download the app if the issues do not directly apply to their situation. Professors would be incredibly motivated to fix issues in their classrooms, dining hall supervisors would be motivated to fix a broken water heater, and a librarian would want to submit a work order for a broken computer.
While the prompt says, “design an experience that allows students to report building or equipment issues on campus,” allowing faculty and staff to be able to submit work orders should also be priority based on potential the issues mentioned above.
The Goal: to Improve the Upkeep
The problem: many universities currently have no way to submit work orders electronically; they need to be done over the phone.
A recent survey by BankMyCell found that 81% of their 1,200 millennial respondents felt the need to summon up the courage to make a phone call. Having a phone number as the only way to submit a maintenance request might deter students.
In 2016, Accors Hotels eliminated their radios and developed an app for their staff and clients. Six months after its launch, Frederic Le Bras, Assistant General Manager stated, "The system has helped us to reduce the time to respond to maintenance requests by up to 50%."
A big problem for universities would be the sheer size of their campus. How does a user find their location? A dropdown could work but there would be at least hundreds of different locations. The best feature of the app would be location sharing. The user would select “use my location” and a Google Maps integration would give them a couple options to narrow down their location.
Sketches
Very roughly I started doing some sketches of how one would set up the account, submit a maintenance request, and how a technician would then resolve the issue:
Technician View
Student, Staff & Faculty View
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Wireframes and Initial Progress
The app needed to have a lot more features than I could draw, so I decided to move to Sketch to create the wireframes.
Below are the wireframes for the student, faculty and staff view. I also included a very simple version of the user’s flow through this part of the app.
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Mockups
I surprised myself by how many ideas I had for the app and just how many steps in the app I could show. I tried to keep it condensed and show the most important aspects of the app and how a user could use it.
At the beginning, I envisioned the app to be a Google product that could be available to all major universities. However, the prompt mentioned that this would be an app created by my university. I decided to design the app to be very minimal, in its own style; however, as this is for Google and I wanted to have fun incorporating Google’s color palette. I decided on the app’s name to be Maintain.
Student Set-Up Screens
The set-up screens and an example of form validation and help (the staff and faculty set up simply omits the dorm room selection screen):
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Requesting Maintenance for Dorm Rooms
Here a student is requesting maintenance for their dorm. Since they saved their dorm while setting up (if they preferred to skip the set up a student would now be asked if they wanted to add their dorm room). I wanted the process of requesting maintenance to be extremely easy; adding a student’s dorm in their account to be saved for all future dorm room requests made sense.
Click on image to enlarge
Requesting Maintenance for Campus Issues
My favorite part of this app is the ability to use location sharing to easily locate a user. The app gives the user a series of options near them and allows them to quickly add correct location without having to scroll though a very large dropdown menu.
In the screens below, a user is now requesting maintenance for a campus issue. They now have the ability to track their location:
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One aspect that would improve the user experience would be to filter down the dropdown so that it is intuitive. For example, if one building had only two floors and no wings, the dropdown under “Floor and Wing” would only show the available floors and only the rooms available would be displayed in the next dropdown.
Maintenance Status, History and User Settings
The app also shows the requests’ progress and allows them to see completed maintenance. If an issue resurfaces or if repairs did not fix the problem, the user can quickly resubmit a ticket for the issue without having to enter the same exact information.
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Technician’s View of The App
It would probably be best to separate these views into two different apps for the maintenance crew. For now I have it as part of the same app, their login allows them to access the maintenance view.
Technicians are able to organize their tasks and view them under different tabs: all, in progress, and completed. The map view shows their location and the open maintenance requests near them. This could save them an incredible amount of travel time by strategically moving around the campus.
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Notifications
The app uses push notifications to notify students, faculty and staff when a maintenance technician will arrive at their dorm or classroom.
Knowing when a stranger is about to knock on your dorm room is always a good thing to know. One feature of the app that is not visible is if roommates have the same dorm room in their settings, they will both receive a notification (if they have allowed push notifications).
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Final Thoughts - Google Maps and Google Tasks Integration
This app was a delight to create and envision. I desperately would have wanted an app like this to exist while I was at Starbucks and I could see this app being extremely useful for apartment complexes all over the US.
The “Maintenance View” in the app would require an extreme amount of planning and organization. I could see Google Tasks being integrated with the app and allow maintenance supervisors to assign tasks and communicate with their technicians. In the app I focus on one technician; however, it is likely that the technician is a part of a very large team. Using Google Tasks features could make this a perfect maintenance team management app! Furthermore, the app’s use of Google Maps is incredibly helpful and most university buildings are already visible in Google Maps.
Thank you for the opportunity to showcase my work and have fun on such an exciting project!
— Haley Ott