Generating Post-Construction Surveys With Autodesk Revit Floor Plans
Duration
1 Year
Role
UX Designer
Team
Situation & Task
To collect post-occupancy data for newly completed projects, architecture teams at Ryan Companies would manually create surveys for each unique space within buildings, and send them out.
This process was repetitive, prone to errors, and made for a horrible experience for the survey taker.
A sole web developer and I (UX Designer) were jointly tasked with generating surveys from architectural floor plans living in Autodesk Revit, and subsequently using these floor plans as navigation for a new web app. I also worked with Ryan's data team to define standards for data collection and storage.
Action
- I conducted internal user interviews with both operations teams, architects, and stakeholders to define high levels flows and application architecture, resulting in a separation between two distinct portions of the application.
- Flows turned into wireframes, which were then presented to stakeholders for validation of design direction.
- Following heavy discussions addressing potential bais in data collection methods, wireframes were approved and high-fidelity prototypes were created.
- Wireframes were turned into high-fidelity prototypes using a modified version of Material Design 2, which were tested, and revealed interaction problems in two key screens.
- After one more round of testing, documentation was created and sent to our web developer.
- First field test occured in summer of 2023, and user-tested the interactive floor-plan based navigation for the first time.
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Results
Due to unforeseen budget cuts, the team was suddenly dissolved despite promising evidence that POET would reduce survey creation time from 8-15 hours down to 1.
The floor-plan based navigation would've helped increase accuracy of survey data by decreasing ambiguity between labels of built and modeled spaces (ex, room 101 might be room 100 in the model).
The experience for the end-user was definitely improved, although unfortunately not enough data was collected to quantify it before the team was dissolved.
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Generating Post-Construction Surveys With Autodesk Revit Floor Plans
Role
UX Designer
Duration
1 Year
Team
The Challenge
Post-occupancy surveys are vital for understanding how spaces serve those who use them, yet the traditional process was cumbersome, non-standardized, and disconnected from the sophisticated spatial designs created in Autodesk Revit. The task was to create a tool that could seamlessly translate complex floor plans into an accessible, interactive survey platform.
The Goal
In the dynamic field of construction project management, the shift from completion to thorough evaluation of spaces is crucial. Ryan Companies, a leader in comprehensive real estate services, recognized the need for an innovative solution to standardize and streamline post-occupancy surveys. The answer came in the form of POET—Post Occupancy Evaluation Tool—a mobile web app built on the robust React framework, designed to transform how occupants and building managers interact with surveys distributed by the Architecture & Engineering team at Ryan.
Multifamily projects alone can range from 100,00 SqFt to 300,000+ SqFt. Manually creating a survey for each unique space in each project to collect data not a viable long term solution.
Product Requirements & Kickoff
Analysts within the Insights & Innovation team came to the Computational Design team with a rough idea of what the application needed to do. These requirements came in the form of some rough digital sketches and notes.
The Solution
Introducing the post occupancy evaluation tool (POET)
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Easily create new surveys
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Keep everyone oriented with interactive floor plans
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Quickly record the good, or the bad
How We got there
chunking functionality into 3 distinct parts
Thinking about the journey from Survey conception to completion revealed three clear and distinct pieces.
Survey creation: Architecture & Engineering (A&E) needed a standard way to create lists of people for a survey to be sent to.
Survey deployment: After a survey has been created, A&E needed to bring in floor plans created for the project in Autodesk Revit.
Survey Administration: Ryan collects data primarily at the level of rooms, and as such needed a standard set of items to be critiqued for each space. This list was provided by the Insights and Innovations' operations team.
Survey creation - architecture & engineering
Design patterns for addressing the management of users and their associate (one to many relationships) are fairly standard. To help choose a pattern, I briefly outlined the mental models of our A&E team to see if I could use patterns from applications they might be already intimately familiar with.
From there, we can quickly put together a flow diagram, and subsequently a wireframe that will be used for testing the initial concept later in the design process.
Survey deployment
Deployment of surveys presented the hardest technical challenge. Nick Dechman worked with Wade Vollink to create the software to export floor plans in a format that they could be read, and converted into a custom built interactive floor plan. This technical undertaking solved two logistical challenges for building surveys:
1. Surveyor orientation, and creating a 1:1 match between the system and the real world.
2. No more manual and tedious creation of lists of spaces on each floor.
Survey Administration - building occupants
As with Survey Creation, the Survey Administration portion took advantage of traditional design patterns around recording information. In an interesting exercise, I mapped out, very roughly, the average mental model of a person in the United States by looking at the most popular digital tools out there, and brainstorming goals and pain-points to watch out for within the architectural context.
PUtting It all together
Taking each of the three pieces and putting it all together resulted in a simple but powerful flow diagram that could be easily tested using the wireframes I had created to test the two distinct interfaces of this application.
Design Validation with user Testing & Interviews
After production of the wire-frame and doing some rudimentary user testing, I was able to put together a simple journey map resulting from light user-testing to identify pain points with the wireframe, before development began.
I found that adjustments needed to be made to the earlier parts in the journey, as some UI text and labels were not clear.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND HANDOFF
High Fidelity Wireframes
After addressing the issues found in the early parts of the journey found from the wireframe testing, and doing some work massaging Ryan's branding guidelines to fit application design I developed some high fidelity wireframes for final review and documentation before hand-off to our web-developer, Nic Dechman.
The hand-off also included extensive documentation and annotation of color, type, spacing, and examples of primary screens at a variety of device sizes.
Survey Management
Survey Administration
Conclusion and Reflection
Despite the challenges, including limited development resources and the need to advocate for a coherent style guide, the final version of POET was largely praised by the stakeholders.
To my knowledge, the full impact of POET remains unrealized due to project discontinuation at the final stages of development brought by the downsizing of Ryan and subsequent elimination of all non-essential development teams, the journey, experience, and positive feedback from stakeholders underscore the potential it held and the value it brought to Ryan Companies.