DePaul university VIRTUAL Tour
Background
The Jarvis School of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) has always offered in-person tours as a way for prospective students to learn more about the school and about DePaul. These tours highlight the amazing resources and labs CDM has to offer. The tours are conducted by knowledgeable students in various major within CDM and are aided by the amazing student workers in various labs.
Challenge
CDM has traditionally been limited to showcasing the CDM Loop Campus and Cinespace through in person tours. The Covid-19 pandemic showed how limiting in person visits can be for prospective students who are unable to travel due to the pandemic or economic hardships. Furthermore, the tours are limited by class schedules and space restrictions. CDM is unable to meet the demand of those wishing for a tour as they do not want to disrupt their current students' learning. By creating a 3D interactive virtual tour, the PUSH team is solving these issues by creating an accessible, interactive tour that can be launched on demand.
Deliverables:
Online 3D interactive tour
PUSH services:
UI/UX design, interaction design
PUSH team:
LeAnne Wagner - Director, Project Manager
Emily Urbina - UX Research Assistant
Eli Petry - UX Research Assistant
Sam Cabrera - Developer
Piyush Pamar - Audio/Visual Producer
Early stage design: ideating on different tour needs
Early stage design: developing tour prototypes
Approach
For many students a campus tour can make or break their decision to attend a certain college. Knowing this, the PUSH team wanted to create a tour that was as appealing to prospective students as possible. The team began by interviewing current tour guides and college freshman to get an understanding of what makes a college tour successful. From this research, our team had several key takeaways about what makes a tour successful. We learned successful tours were personalized, informative, guided and entertaining. From here we began ideating on how to fulfill these needs through a 3D virtual tour. Next, we began creating early mock-ups and prototypes to get an idea of how the tour would look and how the user would navigate throughout the tour. Then we began user testing the prototype and used this feedback to create our deliverable.
The Deliverable
For our deliverable the PUSH team wanted to create a fun and informative 3D tour experience that could live directly on the DePaul website. After conducting research and various user tests the PUSH team created the first version of the JCDM and Cinespace 3D virtual tour. It was important to users that they are able to personalize the tour. With this in mind we decided to divide the tour according to the three school within JCDM. This allows users to view the parts of JCDM that are important and relevant to them. As a way to keep the tour fun and informative a voice over provides information as the user navigates through the tour and pop-ups will appear throughout the tour to provide fun facts via text and video pop-ups. Finally, for navigation users can use arrows on the floor to navigate through the floor they are on and a side bar menu to travel between the floors.
Different school options for studetns to choose from
Within the tour students can use arrows or side navigation
For the future
As stated previously the current version of the tour is the first version. As the Covid-19 pandemic persists and economic hardships continue to prevent students from being able to tour JCDM, DePaul wanted to launch the virtual tour as soon as possible. However, PUSH did not want to create a tour experience that was lacking in anyway. Our team began by discussing everything that could exist within this virtual tour and then took into consideration our timeline and discussed what was possible within our time frame. By doing this we ensured that we created a successful tour experience while also allowing DePaul to launch as soon as possible. Our team's goal is that once the first version has launched, we can go back and consider how the tour can be improved beyond the original to create a second version in the future.