SPOTTY

Spot-a-potty

Credits to: Lisi Case, Kevin Chou, Jacqueline Park & David Chiang

Lack of bathroom access is a serious humanitarian and public health issues

  • bathrooms are difficult to access, particularly for people who have to be on the move frequently

  • bathrooms have become even scarcer with the pandemic, and when looking for ability-, gender- and race-inclusive options

224

toilets would need to be added to meet the needs of Seattle's homeless population

David G. Jones, City Auditor, 2019

~60%

of transgender Americans have avoided public bathrooms for fear of being harassed

National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016

PROBLEM

How might people on the move find public restrooms that fit their needs so that they can save time and have better peace of mind?

PROBLEM STATEMENT

KEY RESEARCH INSIGHTS

*More of our research can be found on Miro.

Emily Beyer

27, DELIVERY DRIVER - TIME MANAGEMENT & EFFICIENCY

"I often have a hard time quickly finding and using bathrooms while I'm delivering food to customers. To try to be efficient, I usually use private bathrooms within the restaurant while waiting for food to come out."

Peter Pelegrino

21, COLLEGE STUDENT - PRIVACY & CLEANLINESS

"I get frustrated using public bathrooms because of long wait lines, seeing clogged toilets, and unfilled paper towels—especially since auto-sensors often don't work for me. I also get concerned about people seeing or hearing me doing my business, so I avoid them."

USER PERSONA

USER TESTING & VALIDATION

  • Unclear site organization

  • Unsure if submitted correctly

  • Fun icon, but confusing for ratings

  • Simplify hierarchy

  • Create confirmation signals/messages

  • Symbolize ratings more conventionally

Key Insights

Ideas for Improvement


We also conducted user validation and usability testing intermittently throughout our project. Users primarily included fellow students, recent university graduates, and miscellaneous users from usertesting.com.

The main concept our team wanted to test out was the difficulty of overall interaction/navigation between the pages and app.

From the user testing feedbacks we got, we found out that most of the users really liked the concept of our app in general because it is something that they have never thought of before. However, because the product we tested was just a prototype and was not deployed fully, some of the users said they had confusion in submitting the review form and sign in or sign up because there was no confirmation message.

SPOTTY

Spot-a-Potty

SCREEN DETAILS

SPOTTY & a sample user journey

DEMO VIDEO

REFLECTION

The duration of this project was about 6 months and I could see my skills and knowledges growing exponentially. I was the main and the only designer of the team and so there were some tough times due to heavy workloads fallen for me, but my teammates were always supportive and gave me suggestions or ideas whenever we had a weekly scrum meeting.

This is one of my proudest work I have ever worked on. Spotty gave me the opportunity to solo-design (mostly) the whole app’s logo, lo-fi and hi-fi designs, short video, banner, and slide.

However, although I enjoyed working as the only designer of the team, I also acknowledged the importance of the design team.