Project Description

On September 9th, Gen8 was tasked to investigate potential problems with the University of Victoria’s (UVic) existing systems for study space booking and how improvements could be made. The systems were found to be fairly complicated and dispersed across various websites; with each site consisting of an arbitrary number of buildings and unique. This particular problem correlates with UVic’s request as with these current set of systems, it can be challenging for students to find study spaces on campus, especially in an institution with over twenty thousand students enrolled.

To fully understand the cause of this issue, Gen8 performed a detailed review of these UVic systems to identify what other aspects could be improved on, determining:

• The systems are incompatible and vastly different from one another; with certain buildings having their own booking systems whereas others simply rely on Google Calendar to both track availability and book rooms.
• A lack of filtering options and room descriptions for particular sites. (e.g. UVic Library Web App)
• Certain sites experience malfunctions irregularly when trying to book a room, with asynchronous delays when browsing open availability.

A solution has been proposed by Gen8 to address these main issues of uniformity, accessibility, and overall user experience:

• A web application designed to unify UVic’s pre-existing study space booking systems under one centralized system, consisting:

  • A user-friendly interface optimized to make the application easy to use for all students regardless of their technological literacy.
  • A filtering system to browse available listings with synchronous feedback.
  • The collection and analysis of user data for the purposes of maintaining and upgrading the application.
  • A database that organizes and analyses user data for the purpose of upgrades to the application and general maintenance.
  • An estimated total cost ranging from [minimum-cost] to [maximum-cost].

As an inevitable result of creating this web application, there will be a few risks to consider:

• The supplied budget can alter the quality of the web application, as it is estimated that the total cost of developing this web application can range from [minimum-cost] to [maximum-cost].
• By merging and unifying all pre-existing systems, the loss of previous data may occur.

Gen8 strongly believes that students will be able to comfortably schedule their study sessions if booking is centralized under a singular convenient source; with the inclusion of key elements such as filtering and synchronous feedback to ameliorate the overall user experience.