While I was walking to class one day, I noticed students were cutting through the bushes. As I walked into the side door of Lynch, I noticed that a permanent foot path was made by the students who wanted to travel from Lynch to the Neidig-Garber academic building and vice versa. In the photograph in the top left, one can see that the school made sidewalks that went away from the direction of the building in order to get to other buildings, making this sidewalk fairly unusable for students traveling from Lynch to Neidig-Garber.
From the students' footpaths, one can see that the sidewalks could be made more usable. In class, a similar post was shared about a path created to get around a barrier. However, this situation on campus is a little different, for students are in a hurry to get to class in the shortest amount of time possible. This can be related to task time; users want tasks to be simple and take the least amount of time possible in order to achieve a goal.
Another principle that can be applied to this unusable path is proximity. In digital communications, proximity is important, for the closer objects are to one another, the more related they appear to be. Clearly, due to the footpath, the school should make a sidewalk that connects Lynch and Neidig-Garber. Since the sidewalk currently is not close to Neidig-Garber when leaving Lynch, students decided to create their own path. A sidewalk would afford proximity by making the walk shorter from one building to another.
As far as testing goes of whether to create a sidewalk, an observational usability test could be conducted. In this observational study, the tester could record the amount of students who travel from one building to another, and record how many use the footpath versus the sidewalk. Interviews could also be conducted to find whether it would be beneficial to create a new sidewalk.
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