Room Draw
TigerDraw is the current Princeton room draw solution, allowing students to favorite rooms and create groups in preparation for room draw. The existing TigerDraw version lacks features of the previous room draw app that allowed users to explore rooms. Reviews, floor plans, and details of each room beyond square footage and occupancy allowed students to better understand what made a room unique. The new version of TigerDraw will integrate the features that worked well from previous versions and build onto them with an in-depth review form. The review form will crowdsource information to allow users to access a detailed overview of a room and make a better-informed decision come room draw.
At A Glance
Team
- Chloe Chen '23
- Jayson Wu '23
- Katie McLaughlin '23
Collaborators
- TigerApps
Tools
- Figma
- Visual Studio Code
- Python
- HTML/CSS/JS
- Heroku
- PostgreSQL
Methods
- User Interviews/Focus Group
- User Testing
- Feasibility vs. Priority Graph
- Affinity Mapping
- User Flow
- Prototypes
Timeline
Ongoing
Problem
How might we improve the existing room draw website to better help students explore and compare rooms in preparation for room draw?
Research
Formulating Questions to Ask and Student Participation.
We built off of last semester's progress by conducting our own user research. We gathered a group of 9 Princeton students and spoke to them about their past room draw experiences. We prepared a few questions as a starting point for the group interview but allowed the discussion to take the conversation in different directions, highlighting important points and reoccurring themes. A good portion of the conversation centered on important room features to consider when picking desirable rooms. Our user research also exposed an issue with the past review system. Seeing as the review form will be such a central part of our design, how can we try to ensure all rooms get a review? It turns out this might have a simple solution, as our focus group said they would have filled out a review if they had just been prompted or reminded.
Ideation
Integrating and Iterating
We ideated different ways to display information to students in an interactive way by combining the good parts of previous sites and building new features to fill in the gaps. For example, the current TigerDraw version features historical draw times as a key point. Our user research found this is not a priority when weighing rooms. The review form we created based on our user research drove a lot of this ideation. With more information, what key details do we want to feature with the rooms table? Market research of how Airbnb and Zillow also assisted in looking at different ways to display content, but the main difference was our lack of images and visuals. Thus, a lot of the work centered on how we could emphasize factual details and room characteristics to fill in the details.
Prototyping
The Review Form as the Catalyst
Our prototyping process centered on information from the review form that we wanted to include. A lot of these changes would be accessible either on or from the rooms page. The first focus was deciding based on the review form, what columns to include in the rooms table. This offshoot into what filters to display and how to display them. The current TigerDraw version only lets the user set Building, College, Occupancy, and “Ranking Range” (historical draw time based on a specific year's room draw).
By clicking a row in the room list, we bring back the room details page from old TigerDraw - but new and improved! We moved away from a chart like display to more of a vertical scroll with a map at the top, somewhat similar to Airbnb and Google Reviews. Integrating the floorplans at the top made sense so users don't have to toggle between the map on a different page and the details.
We also streamlined the group and favorites situation, as that was a point of confusion for students in the focus group. It also takes up two columns on the table when the action is very similar. Thus, we combined favorites + groups to Lists. Students can make multiple lists and decide who to share it with. This also allows for multiple personal lists, useful for if a student is participating in multiple draws (e.g. res college and upperclassmen)
Reflection
The Need for Others.
Even though we were users ourselves and brought our own experiences with room draw into the design process, we found that having a fresh set of eyes on our ideas and designs really helped drive the process with new perspectives. With such a limited team size and busy schedules, market research can be a valuable source of inspiration for tried and tested methods of displaying information rather than solely relying on user research. On the topic of team size, we believe it would be beneficial to have a team larger than three for support and accountability purposes.