Study Spot Finder
Designed a foot-traffic based study spot finder
Spot is an app designed for university students to locate study spots on campus. Using real-time foot traffic from geofencing and location tracking, user check-ins, and supplemental external foot-traffic APIs, Spot informs users how busy each of these study spots are.
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
3 PMs
Timeline
January 31, 2025 - February 2, 2025
Tools Used
Figma, Notion, Google Forms
Finding the right study spot is frustrating. Throughout the day at UC Davis, me and my team see our peers looking around the Memorial Union and CoHo for open tables to study at. In our own experiences, finding a study spot often requires walking to 3 different buildings before an open spot appears.
Currently, UC Davis students have no way to remotely find out how busy their usual study locations before going there. Students currently have to waste a significant amount of time they could have spent studying to walk to the location and find spaces.
We created Spot to target undergraduate students aged 18-22, initially at UC Davis with plans to expand to universities, to help users remotely find information about study spots and the current occupancy of those spots. In order to further establish our initial problem statement, we went to our friends and peers on campus to understand their experiences searching for study spots through a user survey, a competitive analysis, and a SWOT analysis.
User Survey
We surveyed 47 students at UC Davis about their current study habits, study spot discovery, and potential features for our product. Here's what they had to say:
Competitive Analysis
For our competitive analysis, we analyzed local community platforms, review and mapping services, and official resources from UC Davis to find areas of improvement in our competitors.
SWOT Analysis
To better understand the strengths of our product and what features we could explore in the future, we performed a SWOT analysis on Spot.
Tailored for Students
Crowdsourced Data
Study Spot Database
User Adoption
Data Accuracy
Resource Intensive
Partnerships with Universities
Expansion to Other Campuses
Established Competitors
User Engagement
Privacy Concerns
Pain Points
After our user survey, competitive analysis, and SWOT analysis we identified four reoccurring pain points of users in similar products:
Amenity Requirements
Students often struggled to find study spots that had amenities they requires, particularly mentioning the lack of available outlets and unreliable Wi-Fi.
Lack of Remote Information
There is no source of information on campus, other than word-of-mouth, about what study spots on campus have good environments.
Busy Study Spots
Study spots around campus that students usually visited are often completely occupied, forcing students to find other locations to study.
Wireframes
After identifying the primary features we wanted to include into Spot, we began whiteboarding ideas for user flows and user interfaces. Given the short timeframe of the hackathon, my team and I didn't want to scope creep the product, but still wanted to display the primary user flow of the app. Thus, I prioritized creating designs the map page, study spot catalog, the study spot information pages, as well as a few pop up windows that would showcase the 5 primary features we would present.
Final Designs
I created Spot's design system in a minimalist style as not to distract users from the information presented on the website. By employing a lot of white space, the information presented on the screen pops out to users, streamlining the user experience while navigating through the app's pages.
Key Features
Real-Time Foot Traffic
Spot displays the current occupancy and predicted future occupancy of different study spots on campus with a histogram. By combining geofencing, location tracking, user check-ins, and foot-traffic APIs to pull from multiple data streams, Spot offers users the most accurate, real-time insights while prioritizing user privacy and control.
Spot Information & Reviews
Each study spot gives users information about the hours, ammenity tags, and reviews left by other users. This allows users to remotely see information about the study spot without having visit the spot.
Interactive Map
Spot's interactive map indicates all locations of study spots on campus and opens a card with a brief overview of the business of the location, as well as its hours and ratings.
User Check-Ins
Upon arriving at an indicated location, users will be prompted to rate the busyness of the spot which will give other users crowdsourced insights into how many people are at a study spot.
Preference-Based Filtering
Users can also search for study spots through a filterable list of spots. Users can favorite their most visited locations, and filter other locations by distance, hours, and busyness.
After launching any product, the next step is to get users to adopt the platform. We planned a go-to-market strategy to gain attention from students.
Social Media
To grow our social media presnse, we planned to create posts and short-form videos on Instagram and TikTok with trending audios and challenges. We also planned to post the solutions Spot offers on the UC Davis Reddit and Discord servers.
Guerrilla Marketing Methods
We also planned to gain traction through the general student population by focusing on physical campus marketing. Some examples of this could be placing flyers on lecture hall seats, placing desks & mannequins in unconventional high traffic spots, and tabling in high traffic study areas.
Partnerships
Partnering with student organization would further reinforce Spot in the studnet population by incentivizing students to refer others. This would also allow us to introduce "challenges" to get users to familiarize themselves with the app.
My team was awarded First Place in UC Davis's 2025 Product Convention for our entry of Spot. The prompt of the product competition was to "Ideate a product that improves the education experience of a student" and present that solution to a panel of industry judges. Here are some of the other statistics from the event:
1st
Challenges
My work on Spot during the 24-hour hackathon was one of the most intensive sprints ever. But the sprint wasn't entirely smooth. Here are some of the challenges I encountered
Just Start Designing
Most design work I had done before this hackathon had been building upon the work of others. Initially, when faced with a blank canvas to start on, I struggled to think of ideas. Eventually, I decided to stop trying to find a perfect solution, and start white boarding low-fidelity designs. And once I started designing, I found the motivation to continue for the rest of the competition.
Product Ideation Sources
Coming up with the idea for Spot, we wanted to choose a problem that was smaller scale than the obvious issues on campus. We thought that we wouldn't have enough time to find an adequate solution to larger issues such as housing and attention span. In the end, we reached out to our friends to ask them of small pet peeves they had of university life, leading to our ideation of Spot
Priorities in Time Crunches
As with all deadlines, we found that in the end, we had too many items to write for our presentation in the time we had left. I was initially planning to make more examples of marketing ideas for Spot, but found that I needed more time to polish up our UI. In order to ensure the quality of both the UI and our go-to-market presentation, I prioritized the quality of our existing work over the quantity of designs. Had I spent an hour making graphic designs rather than ensuring brand consistency, our UI would have been much less organized, distracting users and the judges from the product's virtues.
Takeaways
My first hackathon experience was to say the least, chaotic. But, when faced with chaos, I found there was no choice but to improve. Here are some of the things I learned:
Be User Focused
Products only work when users use them. If a product doesn’t solve any pain points for its users, users will often user alternative products. By performing user surveys to confirm our problem statement, we proved that user actions are the key to success.
Make Time for Quality
Despite the short timeline and the large list of requirements for our submission, I still carved 4-5 hours to sit down and work on the quality of the Figma designs. If the UX details of a product are clunky, they can distract users from the solutions the product actually offers. Ensuring the quality of small details can make a huge difference to the user experience despite their visual size.
Present with Passion
Despite the end result of the hackathon, I was extremely anxious about the presentation of our features initially, simply due to inexperience. But, as I was speaking, I found myself so engrossed in the work I was sharing my anxiety disappeared. In fact, the judges and many other praised my presentation of our high-fidelity designs. The amount of passion I had poured into Spot outweighed any doubts I had before walking up to the stage.
The Spot Team
Jason (Me!), Puja, Anita, Caitlin