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Purdue University Construction Management (CMT) Department
West Lafayette, IN – Knoy Hall
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Role: Content Manager & Designer
Deliverables: Two physical kiosks with accompanying composite viewing program
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The School of Construction Management at Purdue University had to remove all their student photo composites from the department walls. They still want to have a place where alumni can search through those photos – an interactive kiosk. End Goal: be able to click on the display and search through years of graduates, as well as providing an additional kiosk focused on distinguished alumni.​ Inspiration for all design would be sourced from a new sign recently hung in the CMT lobby that reads “Boiler Built”.
Sponsor: Luciana de Cresce el Debs
Teammates:
Caleb Honneger
AJ Vetter
Nicholas Wong
1 | Evaluation
Physical Space Identification
To get a feel for the space, the team visited the potential location spaces of these kiosks as well as acknowledging where the physical form composites currently hung.
Technical Space Identification
To understand the technical scope and similar concepts in production, the team consulted with expert, David Allen, a Senior Project Manager for Purdue Marketing and Media who is Lead of the touchscreen kiosk project in the Purdue Memorial Union Welcome Center. He provided advice on touchscreen displays, and our project technology execution, and validated our preliminary idea to equip this kiosk with integrated touchscreen to ensure better processing and durability.
Recommendations
He reminded us to allow storage space for computers, cords and connected devices and connected us with ITaP (Information Technology at Purdue) to purchase components at a discounted rate. Allen also said that keeping the computers in a separate space from the touchscreens would lead to a better, cleaner, sleeker design.
2 | Initial Research
Competitive Analysis
In addition to the informational kiosk in the Union Welcome Center, there was another similar project already in use in the Mechanical Engineering (ME) department that the team visited for further competitive analysis.
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Focus Group
To understand what alumni would be interested in seeing when they came back to view their composites, the team held a small focus group with CMT alumni who were in town for the CMT Career Fair. We, as a team, learned extensively about the rich department history and thought it best to start thinking about how to include a timeline of key historic moments that would better represent the department’s history.
3 | Design Direction
Style Unification
Now that the team knew where they were, and their end goal, they needed to present their plans to their sponsor and ensure all would be in line with the CMT department’s design track. A mood board and style guide were created and cleared through the department, incorporating their new Boiler Built sign and adhering to with Purdue Branding guidelines.
Identification of Key Points
In keeping with this style, the amount of information to be included was clarified. The team was asked to have the program highlight 3 key parts of the CMT department. These three parts were: the alumni composites, their Distinguished Technology Alumni (DTA) and significant events in the department’s history. Now that the team understood what needed to be included and where, they were ready to start drafting ideas about the layouts and interactions.
4 | Lo-fi sketches
Once the general design was approved, it was time to dig into the specifics. Those were developed through the sketches below and continuous ideation, all the way through the final weeks of the project.
3 in 1 Sketch
Composites, Alumni and Timeline Events are displayed together in a horizontally scrolling dynamic page. It started with trying to visualize all the information in a timeline-like fashion. This was too large of a scope and could have grown into a different project altogether.
Distinguished Technology Alumni Sketch
Side-scrolling view of each featured alumni, including a large headshot, a paragraph and a parallax-style scrolling background image of one of their projects.
Home Screen Sketches
This next set of sketches considered many different possible approaches to home screen, search page and interactive composite page design layouts.
5 | Prototyping
The team had to create a prototype for the physical kiosk that would house the clickable program to view the composites digitally.
Physical Kiosk Iteration 1
Viewing Program Iteration 1
Physical Kiosk Iteration 2
Viewing Program Iteration 2
6 | User Testing
Lobby Testing
In the lobby of Knoy, a guerilla test was conducted, asking anyone who walked by to put themselves in our scenario. Each willing participant was asked to put themselves in the shoes of a past CMT student who has come back to learn about the most historic moments of the department or to find a friend who was in that alumni’s graduating class (the student was provided with a graduation year and a name that was in the database) to understand their interaction with our prototype.
7 | Final Design
Pain Points
After user testing, the team analyzed the data and developed a final design. There was a common question from participants of "Why approach this kiosk if I am not alumni?" and this was possibly due to a lack of title or instructions included, which was solved by pasting a description along the side of the kiosk.
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8 | Next Steps
The Handoff
The final design was not simply comprised of clickable images but rather, fully coded and ready to be published so this program can be accessed not only on the fourth floor of Knoy Hall but around the world. All code, digital composites, text and designs have been given to the CMT department. Next steps would be material and manual labor acquisition to build the physical kiosk, purchase a durable, touchable screen and make application accessible on screen once hung.
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