Project 06 / 06
UX research · Co-design · University project
Pin
Pin is a campus map where something broken gets a pin, other people add to it instead of repeating it, and the university has to reply with a status that moves or explains itself. Four students named it and defined it. My part was the two-stage co-design programme that got us there, which meant designing the research tools and not the product.
The Brief
How can digital platform design improve dignity and comfort in everyday life? That was the question. The catch was that we weren't allowed to start with an answer, a problem statement or a list of features to validate.
Every other project in this portfolio starts with me deciding something and testing whether I was right. This one was the opposite. The participants defined the problem, and my job was to set things up so they could do that honestly.
That makes the kit the interface. A card with five ruled fields asks a different question from a blank page. A pre-printed category is a decision already made. A colour with a stated meaning turns a sticky note into a vote. Each of those is an interaction design choice, and each one either invites something true or nudges someone towards the answer I already had in mind.
Starting in Public
We ran a two-hour pop-up in the Wilkinson Building lobby instead of recruiting people into a room. Nobody had come to help us. They were walking to class, so the whole activity had to work in about five minutes at a stall they happened to pass.
20+
Students and staff
Recruited entirely from foot traffic, with no screening and no reward beyond a bowl of lollies.
42
Responses
Notes and cards left on the boards, each one written and placed by the participant.
16
Campus locations
Every response pinned to the exact place on the map it was about, not a general category.
5 min
Per participant
The hard constraint. It set the format of every card, prompt and voting mechanic on the table.
Participants pinned their own notes. We did not transcribe for them, which kept their wording intact.
The stall in the lobby. Boards at eye level, materials at arm's reach, nothing needing explanation.
ACTIVITY 1
Invisible Needs Map
Green for a place that supports you, orange for a place that needs improvement, pinned to the exact spot on a campus map. Because people had to place the note, every complaint was tied to a location we could go back to.
ACTIVITY 2
Future Campus cards
One open prompt: imagine a future campus that better supports people's everyday needs, and what would it include. Written or drawn, then pinned up for the next person to read.
THE CHEAP TIER
A gold star
Anyone could read what others had left and star what they agreed with. It gave people with thirty seconds a real way to contribute, and it turned a wall of individual complaints into a rough measure of what was shared.
The star sticker was the most useful thing on the table. It cost a passer-by nothing, so people who would never have filled in a card still left a signal. It's the reason we could tell one person's bad day from a problem twenty people recognised.
What Came Off the Wall
Forty-two responses across sixteen locations, coded into seven themes through affinity diagramming. The stacked pins are where several people independently named the same building.
Green marks a place that supports people, orange a place that needs improvement. Numbered pins are stacked responses for the same building.
INSIGHT 01
Supported by people, let down by placePeople described support in terms of other people: warmth, community, staff who helped. What needed improving was almost always physical: broken lifts, seating, food, bins. The campus was valued for how it felt, but it fell short on the basics that let students stay.
INSIGHT 02
Services exist, but the system doesn'tThe wellbeing centre, the career hub and learning support were each praised on their own, and none were described as connected. The most detailed responses asked for networked care linking academic, legal, financial and health support.
INSIGHT 03
Small needs, shared by manyThe highest-starred notes were working lifts, affordable food, bins and sheltered seating. These are things people put up with daily and don't escalate. Star voting gave a wider group an easy way to confirm the same everyday concerns.
What the Map Could Not Tell Us
We now knew where things broke and roughly how many people agreed. We didn't know what anyone actually did next.
A pin on a map is a category. It doesn't tell you whether the student reported it, worked around it, paid to fix it themselves, or quietly stopped going to that building. That gap is the whole design question, because a platform that only makes problems visible is no use if people don't report them for some other reason.
So the second stage traded reach for depth: four students, sixty minutes, seated, with a kit built to capture what happens between noticing a problem and living with it.
Designing the Kit
The centrepiece is an A3 sheet I'd happily call a screen if it had pixels on it. One card in the middle holds a real situation, four zones sit around it, and a colour system lets three other people annotate your experience without a facilitator interpreting anything.
ZONE 01
What I noticed
The moment of recognition, separated out so it is not collapsed into the complaint.
ZONE 02
What I tried or used
The support that was reached for, whether or not it worked.
AT THE CENTRE
My Need Moment
One specific situation on a card: where, what happened, why it mattered, what you did first.
ZONE 03
What I avoided or could not use
The most valuable zone. Avoidance is a decision, and it rarely gets written down anywhere.
ZONE 04
What I handled myself
The work students absorb. This is where the cost of the problem actually shows up.
Four zones, not a sequence. Participants build their own sheet, rotate to everyone else's, then come back to their own to vote.
The colour system is the legend
Five materials with five stated meanings, explained once at the start. After that the sheet reads itself, and the analysis doesn't depend on anyone remembering who said what.
Yellow
Your own content. You fill your four zones first, before anyone else touches the sheet.
Blue
Same for me. I recognise this. Resonance, added by someone else on your sheet.
Pink
Different for me, or this would not work for me. Disagreement gets its own colour rather than a conversation.
★
Star
Most important, or genuinely helpful. Placed by the sheet's owner once everyone has annotated it.
Red dot
The biggest friction point. One mark that separates an irritation from a real barrier.
Pink is the one I'd defend the most. Giving disagreement its own colour meant a participant could contradict someone without arguing with them, and it stopped the loudest person in the room setting the group's position. Every pink note is a finding we'd otherwise have lost to politeness.
The kit in play. Everything on the table has a stated meaning before anyone writes anything.
A sheet part way through, with the need moment card that anchors it sitting above.
The start of a session. Five ruled fields and a coloured band, and nothing else on the table yet.
Designing Out My Own Assumptions
We piloted the kit before running it. Almost every change was the same correction: something I'd designed was quietly answering the question for the participant. These are the ones worth showing.
Planned
An open warm-up discussion about campus needs
Too broad. People gave general opinions about the university and not anything that had actually happened to them.
Became
Two card types: Campus Glitch and Campus Save
One small thing that made your day harder, one that helped. Concrete, under a minute, and it gets the good alongside the bad so the session isn't just a complaints box.
Planned
"Write about two real campus moments"
Too vague to analyse. It never said what counted as a moment, so responses ranged from a specific Tuesday to a general feeling about first year.
Became
A Need Moment Card with five fixed fields
Where, what happened, why it mattered, what you did first, and how you recognised it. The fields do the facilitating, so a quieter participant gives the same quality of evidence as a talkative one.
Planned
A linear support journey map
Too linear and far too service-design shaped. It assumed students move neatly from need to support, and a template like that only ever gives back the answer it implies.
Became
The four-zone relay sheet
A station and not a sequence. It holds people, places, services and self-management side by side, and it made room for the finding that mattered most: avoiding support is a decision, not a gap.
Planned
A support quality sort with seven descriptors
Overloaded. Visible, accessible, connected, dignified, comfortable, useful and appropriate are my words, and sorting them only tells me what participants think of my vocabulary.
Became
Three sentence stems on a card
Support is worth using when. Support fails when. Support should never. Participants write the principle in their own language, and none of the three can be answered with a feature request.
Planned
Pre-written touchpoint tiles for the ideation session
The tiles assumed the shape of the answer. A table with "notification", "map" and "status" printed on it will produce a reporting app every single time, and we'd have called that a finding.
Became
Blank slips and a facilitator-only prompt sheet
Participants name the steps. The prompts stay with the facilitator so they can unstick a group without putting options on the table. Feature stickers went the same way, because they invite decorating and not designing.
Planned
A formal observer sheet and a transcript-based analysis
It didn't match what we actually captured. We had photographs and kept sheets, not recordings. Leaving the plan in the appendix would have suggested a body of data that didn't exist.
Became
Face-free photography and retained artefacts, and we said so
This is the change I'm most willing to defend. The easiest thing in the world is to describe the method you intended. We rewrote the plan to describe the evidence we actually held, and the analysis is more honest for it.
What Came Back
Every note, card and slip was transcribed as written, then coded in three passes: clusters first, then patterns across clusters, then the insight underneath.
PASS 01
Seven clusters
- Infrastructure is broken, missing or inadequate
- Students self-manage because nothing else works
- Cost is transferred onto students
- Avoidance is an active and deliberate strategy
- Institutional support is unresponsive or untrusted
- Peer knowledge fills the gap
- What good support looks and feels like
PASS 02
Five patterns
- Infrastructure failure is shared but absorbed silently
- Self-management has a real financial and time cost
- Avoidance is chosen because formal support is not trusted
- Peer networks are more reliable than formal systems
- Students know what good support feels like and do not get it
PASS 03
Four insights
- The campus is creating invisible labour
- Trust is the barrier to support uptake, not awareness
- Peer knowledge is already doing institutional work
- Dignity is eroded by accumulated small costs
"I just paid 40 dollars and got one that fits the charging ports."
On solving an incompatible charging port alone. Two peers starred it, one adding that the cost of living crisis even manifests in the university.
"I just avoided picking classes in Wilkinson building."
The clearest version of avoidance as a strategy. Not a complaint about a building, but a change to a degree.
"You miss one hundred percent of the shots that you did not take."
Left by a peer, on a note that said "I did not ask the tutors". It drew three red dots, which is the sheet disagreeing with itself in public.
Need Moment Cards. The fields are why four different people produced comparable evidence.
Support Rule Cards. Design principles written in participants' own words, not ours.
The closing Pattern Wall, built by the group in the last five minutes as a visible handover.
The finding the kit was built to catch
Every participant had a workaround, and not one had reported the problem. It wasn't laziness, and it wasn't that they didn't know about the services. It was a sensible read of a system that hadn't moved the last time they used it. That only showed up because "what I avoided" had a zone of its own, next to "what I tried", where a participant had to fill in both.
Where Pin Came From
The last session brought the same four participants back to turn the evidence into a direction. Seven activities in seven sealed envelopes, opened one at a time, so nothing sitting on the table could hint at what was coming.
One rule governed the whole kit: leave it blank wherever the participant should be deciding. Cluster names weren't pre-printed, because printing a category is choosing it. Risk cards became blank slips, because risks a designer writes are the designer's risks. The phone-shaped prototype templates were replaced with frames that could hold a screen, a message, a map, a status or a service moment, because the brief said platform, experience or service and only one of those is an app.
The facilitation script worked the same way, right down to a list of things not to say:
×"Would an app fix this?"
→"What would support need to do here?"
×"Which feature do you want?"
→"What should this help students do, or avoid?"
×"This was a problem for students."
→"This came up in earlier evidence. Does it fit, need changing, or not apply here?"
×"Users will..."
→"A student might..."
It paid off in the first ten minutes. We handed over a card saying trust is the barrier to support uptake, which was our reading of the evidence and the one we were most attached to. A participant put a red dot straight on it: trust is fine when things actually move, the problem is that nothing happens, so calling it a trust problem is wrong.
Response, not trust. That correction reshaped the rest of the session, and it only happened because the card was made to be argued with and not agreed with.
What the group settled on, and named in the room, was Pin. It's a campus map where you drop a pin on something broken, add to someone else's pin instead of writing a duplicate, and the university has to attach a status that either moves forward or explains why it won't. The rules around it are theirs, not ours: a separate, more private track for accessibility needs, a free fallback so a tip never costs money to act on, and a hard cap on how much anyone has to write. Nothing was built, and none of it was meant to be. The deliverable was the evidence and the direction it pointed, which is what a co-design programme is supposed to produce.
What This Taught Me
That a research tool is a designed object, and it behaves just like an interface: it has defaults, it has affordances, and whatever it makes easy is what you get back.
My instinct is to turn up with an answer. Most of my other work rewards that. Here it was the thing that went wrong, and I could watch it happen in the pilot: every version of the kit that felt more designed was a version that had decided more on the participant's behalf. Holding back turned out to be the harder skill, and leaving things blank the more expensive one.
I should be clear about the limits too. Four participants across both workshops gives depth and not coverage, and using the same four people twice means we got continuity but a narrower view. The pop-up reached twenty, but in five-minute slices. Those are real limits on what any of this can claim, and they belong in the write-up and not in a footnote.
What I'm taking into the next project is smaller and more practical. Give disagreement its own colour. Make the cheapest way to take part a real one. Write down the plan you actually followed, not the one you meant to. And when a participant tells you your framing is wrong, the session is working, not failing.
