Milan embraces millions of tourists evey year. There are few dedicated public toilets in Milan. People are complaining that the number of public toilets in Milan is low, some of them are chargeable, dirty and some even broken. The problem is not only existing in Milan, Italy, but also in other countried of the Europe because of high maintenance cost. The problem also causes the city dirty because of the high rate of open defecation.

Our project on the public toilet service system focus on a specific issue, but because it is aimed at all user groups, including locals and tourists from different places, people who speak different languages with different cultures, as well as different age groups and even special groups, it gives us a rich and diverse personas of our users. Therefore, to make public toilets more accessible to the public and be easliy reached to every group of people in the society become our challenge.

The project starts from the public toilet system. And to foucs the design on a definite orientation, we have found out the detailed problem and  tried to foucs on one specific challange. Then we have conducted the research part which contains the user empathizing analysis, the validation of ideas by users. After the validation we generated our final solution and made the final design with prototype.

We have found that the common ways for people get access to public toilets in Milan are going to the central train station, department stores,  museums and galleries. But these places are not located everywhere. And many toilets require an entry fee of €1. Besides, some people tend to ask for toilet in street restaurants, but it is also not convenient and some of them are not disabled-friendly.

As we can see, people are complaining on the Internet that the number of public toilets in Milan is low, some of them are chargeable, they are dirty and some are even broken. Based on the research result, we have got the idea that the most frictions are not having enough information of toilets and hard to find and locate the toilets. Meanwhile, how to deal with the problem that the toilets are not friendly to special groups of people is our another challange.

We have generated the how might we to help us define our ideas.

How might we make more toilets accessible for everyone, and help people find toilets easily and simply?

In this phase we have made four personas in different ages and different needs. And we tried to put ourselves in their shoes to think about what they will say and think of the public toilets and found their needs and expectations.

-While experiencing pain, it is hard to focus for a long time on searching toilets.
-Wanting to know the cleanness of the toilet because of germophobia.
-Wanting to know if the toilet has the accessibility facilities for wheelchair people.
-Availability of a baby changing room and in which toilet it is located.
-The doubt whether it is appropriate to ask for the bathroom in restaurants or museums.
-Not knowing which toilet is closest to go to.
-Not knowing opening hours.
-Not knowing whether I need to pay for it.
-Asking for how much to pay can make me feel awkward.

Our concept is to create a system that:
-Provides a system to show detailed information about toilets (whether need to pay/ the payment ways/ accessibility/ facilities).
-Provides a tourist map with different categories of public toilets in the city.
-involves restaurants and shopping malls to make more toilet public to people.
-Allow online paying for the fees.

We designed our final application based on card sorting and tree testing. We do several user testings of the lo-fi prototype and achieved our final hi-fi prototype.

Before reaching a solution, it is necessary to think very differently, identify problems and find solutions to these problems. Before the ideation phase we didn't have a clear idea to focus on, however the user research has helped to conclude all the pain points to reach a target design point. And in a service system, the design has to take consideration about all the stakeholders in the system and look into the exchange between stakeholders. The solution is profitable for the restaurant owners in the city, while increasing the total number of toilets public to users.