Our Problem Proposal

     With the transition back to in person classes, many students have never had the opportunity to learn the layout of the campus. This lack of knowledge can make it difficult for students to get to their classes on time. This problem typically exists for incoming freshmen, transfer students, and new faculty every year. With the pandemic having forced classes online for a full year, this problem is magnified as many students and faculty spent their first year at UGA with limited to no time on campus.

     Difficulties learning the campus layout can result in students suffering from increased anxiety by being in an unfamiliar environment, with difficulties gauging the distance and managing the amount of time needed to travel across campus from class to class, and with difficulties figuring out the optimal routes to quickly travel between classes. These complications can make it difficult for students to get to their face-to-face instruction classes on time. This affects both their learning, potentially their grades, their classmates, and the instructor by way of degraded teaching quality because of the interruption of students arriving late.

     The UGA App is advertised as being the “central mobile app for students, visitors, parents, faculty, staff and fans”. While the UGA app has features which allow students the capability to view the bus routes and building locations on campus, it often lacks interpretable signifiers for many of these affordances, making it a challenge for the end user to use. In addition, the app can often provide inaccurate or conflicting navigation information, misleading the end user and causing frustration and headache. Because the navigation features are either inaccessible or provide misleading information, they do not meaningfully reduce the time to learn the campus, which results in anti-affordances.

     One example is the search function of the app, which allows users to search for and get directions to a specific building. The search function provides several results for the same building that all lead to slightly different locations, and can sometimes provide location information that is completely incorrect. Another example is the bus route function of the app which allows users to select bus routes to view on the map; however, too many bus routes selected makes it difficult to keep track of relevant buses that can take the user to their destination. In addition, the incorporated integration with the UGA MyID system gives users the expectation that it will provide personalized navigation assistance to the user, however this is not an affordance it provides.

     We feel that this problem of campus navigation is entirely unique to face-to-face instruction because, for face-to-face instruction, it is mandatory for students to arrive to class in person if they wish to excel in the class and receive lessons. It does not affect hybrid and online classes because a student never needs to become comfortable with campus navigation as they can simply attend the course online if they are confused.