ALEX ESCUDERO
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STANFORD MOBILEStanford’s campus
made simple

Stanford Mobile is an app designed to help navigate Stanford’s thriving campus. It provides valuable information about the Marguerite bus schedule, dining halls, upcoming events, and more, but its user experience leaves much to be desired in the way of usability. 

With two classmates, I redesigned two core features of the Stanford Mobile app. After identifying our target users as freshmen and campus tourists, we audited user flows for accessing dining hall menus and planning trips on the campus bus, then used iterative prototyping and quantitative user testing to produce new user interfaces for both features.



Auditing Stanford Mobile



Hierarchichal Task Analysis 1: Accessing a dining hall menu


Hierarchichal Task Analysis 2: Planning a trip using campus bus





Problem Definition






Key Findings
  • The most relevant information in app is incorrectly prioritized and hard to access.
  • Overall layout is not cohesive and is somewhat dissimilar to other mobile apps.
  • Planning a trip through marguerite requires a great deal of working memory.
  • Features and buttons are not organized based on their actual use by students.



Target Users






Ideation + Paper Prototyping







Main ChangesWe started by adding defaults and prioritization to the interface rather than changing it completely. Our design strategies involved creating a search function for dining options, introducing filters to sort dining halls, and integrating a pre-existing bus trip planner into the interface.

User Testing Quotes
“I’d like to have the dining halls automatically sorted based on whether they’re open and how close they are to me.”

“Trip planner is clear but I’d want to have the date and time automatically inputted.”

“What is that pin for?”


Med-Fi Prototypes







Iterations from Lo-FiWe made every interaction internal to the app, created new compartmentalized menus, solidified default states, and made adjustments to the dining hall list view.


Usability Testing Results






User Insights
  • One user forgot to enter a destination before confirming a trip, but system did not prevent the error.
  • One user did not know which category to select between “Line Schedule” and “Trip Planner”.


Minor Insights
  • Dining hall exterior photos would be helpful.
  • Should display current location.
  • More obvious buttons through color.


Quotes
  • “I like that I was able to enter multiple menus nested within each other, then go back to each one.”
  • “I appreciated that there weren’t more than two boxes every row.” 
  • “I was a bit confused about which one to select between line schedule and trip planner because I could also try to see if I want to know the line of the buses going over there instead of planning my trip… these two wordings were a bit confusing.”





Final Result







Key ImprovementsThe new information prioritizes information and sections most likely to be used by our target users: health check and mobile ID are seen first, followed by dining and transportation sections. Featured events and other sections are consolidated into news and events at the bottom.

When a user goes to search for a dining hall, the dining halls are sorted by their hours and distance. When users access the menu for a given dining hall, the default view is based on the time of day.

Lastly, the trip planning interface utilizes current location and accounts for various user errors, creating a more intuitive user experience.

Available for work
I’m currently based in San Francisco and open to full time roles and consulting.

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