The Hague Municipality Atrium Redesign
Type of project
University project for local municipality
Role & Team
Equally contributing in an end to end design process in a team of 5 UX Design students
Time
February - May 2019 (around 3 days/week)
Deliverables
Video prototype, 2d map, Handout for the client
Context & Problem
In a second year course “shared spaces“ in a UXD program at The Hague University of Applied Sciences me and four of my classmates worked with The Hague Municipality to redesign their main atrium. The client was looking for ways to change the space to be more visitor-centered, therefore we were asked to deliver a coherent design considering multiple aspects of the atrium.
- Mind maps
- Desk Research
- Interviews
- Observations
- Personas
- Individual concepting
- Group brainstorming
- Client involvment
- Desktop walkthrough
- Service staging
- In-context prototyping
- Video prototyping
Full process
Explore
After a client meeting and a design brief we started with mind-maps to have an overview of all the aspects of the atrium and its visitors, to better decide on what and how we will research.
In our research setup we agreed on a combination of methods to gather more accurate data.
Define
We made three personas to represent the three main groups of visitors
Based on the interviews and the client meeting we agreed on three main goals for our design
Help the visitors to find their way around more easily.
Make the space more friendly for older people and for people who just come to sit and chat with friends or eat a sandwich.
Engage people during the waiting time.
Ideate
Each of us brought 2 his/her own concepts and together we discussed them and build upon each other’s ideas.
We picked the best nine ideas, three for each of our design goal and presented the posters to our client.
Around eight people from the management of the municipality participated and gave us feedback. Following their viewpoints, we eliminated some of the concepts and combined others. We converged from the original nine to four concepts.
The pinpoint
Digital interface kiosk showing visitors their way around.
Better seating
Enables back support for elderly and creates nicer vibe for just “hanging out”.
Future ground
Interactive floor map of the Hague presents the landmarks of the city and involves citizens in planning the future of the city by allowing them to place suggestions for new buildings.
House booths
“House” booths make the citizens feel more welcomed and make the atmosphere during the appointment less “sterile”.
Prototype & Test
Desktop Walkthrough
Creating cardboard model of the atrium with our own 4 newly designed touchpoints enabled us to act out scenarios and reveal the main flaws of our design.
Main outcome of this test → having interactive map and ticket machine as two separate devices was unnecessary, therefore we combined them.
Service staging
Acting out the design with easily accessible props enabled us to quickly reveal more flaws.
Main outcome of this test → Creating the first real-size prototype of the pinpoint helped us to decide how it will work, we added touchscreen below the map.
In-context testing
Testing our prototypes at the municipality allowed us to have normal visitors as participants and therefore gather very valuable feedback.
We were mostly nervous about the Future ground as this was the biggest gamble. Concept which hasn’t been validated before. However, all the visitors got easily engaged with our paper prototype. This was the last testing of our prototypes. We tweaked only a few things and incoprorated the changes into the final video prototype.
