Jeffrey Has An Opportunity, Now What?

Opportunity: gator1 app. The University of Florida is built on a relatively old campus especially compared to other in-state schools like UCF and FAU. This causes many interactions between students and the campus itself to be less than streamlined. The opportunity in this is making everything more streamlined and building an app that does just that. The app would include many things such as a map of campus, it would make things such as laundry and studying easier if you could see if things such as laundry machines and study rooms in libraries were available for use. There are hundreds of issues this app could help resolve, the possibilities are endless.

The who: students in Gainesville

The What: Technologically speaking, the majority of UF’s campus is not up to date and is in many areas faulty.

The why: it is an old campus that needs to be updated for students to have a more streamlined experience.

Interviewee #1: Will

When I asked Will my set of questions his main gripe with the old campus of UF was its laundry system. He lives in Beaty Towers West and says that multiple times he went down to do his laundry and all of the machines were being used. He ended up waiting for a washing machine to be open and continued to do his laundry. Waiting so long for a machine caused him to be late for his class. He thinks there could be a computerized system that can show how many washing machines are available so if he is planning on doing wash, but has class later, he will know if there is sufficient space available for him to do his laundry in time.

Interviewee #2: Jake

Jake says the most extreme difficulty he faces with the UF campus is the bus system. I asked if he knew about the bus app Rider and he did, he said it’d be much easier if he could call a bus instead of just waiting at the bus spot because sometimes the bus doesn’t see him and skips the spot. This could simply be his fault but it is important to note, maybe the Rider app could become a part of the new Gator1 app.

Interviewee #3: Maddie

Maddie said she is an avid gym-goer. Her largest gripe with UF is its gyms and not being able to get on machines because it’s too packed at the gym which causes her workouts to be much longer than they should be. She thinks if you could somehow see which machines were available or at least see how many students are at the gym, it would make her life so much easier. She is a Biomedical Engineering major and claims that the long waits at the gym cost her a lot of time she “needs” to be spending studying.

Interviewee #4: Joshua

Joshua decided that his most essential issue with the campus and how old it is, is he does not know when everything is open on campus. He said “I know there is probably some place for me to look, but I don’t know where to look. Sometimes I go to South West and all of the basketball courts are taken up by intramural sports.” While this is more an issue in terms of Josh’s laziness, it would absolutely be convenient to have open and close times and facility availability hours on the app.

Interviewee #5: Gustavo

Gustavo many times said he disliked the way that the dining options on campus functioned. He says multiple times he has been made late to class do to long lines at places such as Panda in the Reitz and Chick fil a by Broward dining. I think to resolve this, in the app we could make an ordering option so one could make their order ahead of time so that when they get to desired dining option, they would not have to wait in a 20-minute line.

After the interviews, I have concluded that there are many more opportunities than I previously thought to streamline the campus. All of which could be ran through the app.