As we moved forward in the quarter, we found ourselves making adjustments to our design to better fit the needs of our users. It was a rewarding but challenging process. Throughout this process, we particularly struggled with deciding on the problems that we wanted to address and a fitting solution to those problems. With each iteration of our design, we were able to come closer to a solution that we, as a group, not only agreed on but also felt, as a whole, was better catered to the needs, skillsets, and capabilities of our users.

 

Because of time constraints, we did not go as in-depth into user research as we would have liked. We believe more research would have provided us with more insight to help us better understand our user group and how to help them. In addition, we would have liked to further develop our ideas, specifically, the smart objects that are involved in our system. It would have been nice if we were able to hold more discussions on the effects of having smart objects and to identify other areas to implement them in.

 

One interesting piece of feedback that struck us during our presentation is that Cleaner Campus may change the relationship dynamics between a custodian and their supervisor.  Currently, there exists a level of trust between the custodian and supervisor. The supervisor is trusting the custodians will fulfill their duties. But, with a system that requires the custodian to formally record and report their workflow, this level of trust and informality is possibly compromised. Admittedly, in designing the system, we did not consider this aspect and mostly intended for the system to streamline the workflow. In the future, we might make it so that custodial supervisors are not able to view the subtask list in order to reduce the custodian's feeling of being micromanaged by supervisors. We believe this is a good start to preserving the custodian's sense of independence and feeling of trust from the supervisor. 

 

Another idea that we did not carefully consider when designing our system was the possible reduction of the custodial staff’s autonomy. When designing our system, we focused on optimizing tasks for efficiency, thinking that this optimization would only support the staff. Since we had already discussed the idea of supporting instead of replacing the staff, we believed our designs were beneficent. Unfortunately, we failed to consider how optimization of efficiency may create a negative system where custodians begin to lose their humanity from a lack of autonomy. Creating a system solely based on efficiency means that custodians would no longer be working to create a positive environment and, instead, would be working to get the tasks done. Essentially, in our efforts to avoid replacing the custodians with a set of robots, we did not see how our system, had it gone to the extreme, would reduce the custodial staff into robots themselves.

 

Cleaner Campus was created to empower custodians by using technology to decrease the burden of their workload and enable them to operate more efficiently. Along the way, we missed a few important details. We believe we missed these important ideas because of a lacking deeper understanding of our user. We feel that, had we spent more time researching our users to understand them on a deeper level, we may have not missed these key ideas. So in moving forward, it's crucial that our group refocuses on the user and carefully considers how our current system can affect them, both positively and negatively. Being able to find a balance between efficiency and autonomy that will enhance the custodial staff's workflow while also preserving their relationship dynamics between staff is a difficult challenge. But, we believe that solving this challenge, and others like it, is what makes the difference between user-centered design and just design. In the end, if our design does not help our target users, then we can't really call ourselves user-centered designers.