UniWay

Inspiration

UTD has numerous event spaces, from Galaxy rooms with AV/table setups to the SU Mall. During events, overlaps and scheduling conflicts occasionally occur. In conversations we happened to have with faculty and organizations involved in these conflicts, we learned how they typically book spaces for their events. From these discussions, we identified areas for improvement in the current booking system and brainstormed features to prevent future scheduling inconsistencies.

What it does

UniWay is a campus navigation and booking app designed to help students easily locate campus facilities, reserve event spaces, and report maintenance issues. It provides real-time information on room availability, booking options, and an interactive campus map, reducing scheduling conflicts and enhancing campus accessibility.

How we built it

The interface for Uniway has been built using Figma. UTD has numerous event spaces ranging from Galaxy rooms with AV/table setups to the SU Mall. During events, overlaps and scheduling conflicts occasionally occur. During one such occurrence, we met and spoke to the organizations involved in these conflicts. After some discussion, we learned how they typically book event spaces. From this, we identified areas for improvement in the current booking system and brainstormed features to prevent future scheduling inconsistencies.

Challenges we ran into

Diverging ideas and limited time: The CBRE prompt paired with the detailed Challenge Statement document gave us a good push toward the right direction, however, at one point during the hackathon, we had to limit the ideas/features we had to demonstrate using Figma as our ideas and individual thought processes were only diverging. Given the 24-hour time frame, we tried our best to highlight the key features that the application must include to make it well-rounded. On top of that, we also had to work on our assignments for college as it was a weekend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learnt Figma, submitted individual college assignments and tested the boundaries of our friendship all in 24-hours!

What we learned

As we in our team are engineers who are noobs on designing so bringing the perspective of design in the development is what we learnt and also we practically learnt figma from scratch. The true lesson of design is to have a clear goal and stick with what you want.

What's next for UniWay

Say, a student from another university wants to visit UTD, he will be able to select UTD from the University’s dropdown list. He will then be able to access the college navigation feature as well as the Events List. However, as he is not a student of UTD, he will not be able to book his own space at UTD. Instead he will be directed to contact the respective department that handles reservation of campus spaces for 3rd party folks. Current reward system will be explored further, to delve deep and find more opportunities to make it more interactive and user-friendly.

Built With

• figma