Post Occupancy Evaluation in Higher Education

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a process of assessing building performance for its users and intended function during occupation. User satisfaction impacts the performance of educational environments and their users: students, faculty and staff. In addition, buildings are maintained and managed by teams that spend large amount of time and capital in their long-term sustenance. By evaluating the feedback from users of higher education facilities, university planning departments are more prepared to understand the inputs for programming and future project planning. In addition, university buildings will be closer to meeting user and maintenance needs.This paper reports on research team made up of academics, facility personnel and users that have developed a plan to improve the quality of campus facilities through a POE exercise on a recently built project. This study utilized a process of focus group interviews representing the different users, and subsequent survey. The paper demonstrates both the theory and practice of POE in higher education and learning environment through the case example of the University of Utah POE exercise.