Housemates App

Inspiration

As students that have gone through the process of off-campus housing, we see the importance of providing other students with a safe and reliable application that can ease the process. Since there isn’t one just one place to look for information, students often feel overwhelmed to sign a lease without fully understanding what to look for or what a lease entails.

What it does

Housemates is an application that enables students to look for housemates while also providing information on the apartments in Davis as well as giving student’s access to tips all in one application.

How we built it

We started off with brainstorming through a Google doc and researching by sending out a short Google Form for students to fill out. When we have a more solid idea, we used Figma to build the prototype and plan out our low-fidelity and high-fidelity designs based on what we found and talked about.

Challenges we ran into

During the low-fidelity stage, we ran into many problems related to missing components that needed to be added or adjusted, information that isn't clear and had to be refined/defined, and because there’s a time limit, we had to think quickly for these issues. Time definitely was the biggest challenge because there’s many iterations and testing that needs to be done in order to make this successful, but we had to work through them ourselves.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everyone had different levels of experience with Figma, but at the end we all pulled through together and really got a hang of prototyping and adapting to each other’s styles. Those who had to overcome the initial learning curve came out victorious in being able to not only design, but prototype and add interactions to their pages.

We also conducted a user survey and received about 50 responses within 12 hours, which was a result of mass sending and asking peers to fill it out. We also conducted an extensive research and created an information architecture diagram based on shared experiences, survey replies, and personal research.

Lastly, we were able to combine ideas and find ways to elevate our design through feedback and iteration. As students, we are accustomed to Professor feedback and not having the same environment pushed us to use our skills.

What we learned

Many people we received responses from feel that their universities don’t offer enough resources for looking for housing, which is difficult especially having to juggle that responsibility as full-time students.

Regarding skills, we feel like we learned more about hackathons and how to use Figma to create this project.

What's next for Housemates App

We hope to present this to the ASUCD Executive Office and Housing Advising, since one of our group members is part of that organization and knows they have been trying to develop a website or app to help students at UC Davis navigate looking for off-campus housing.

Built With

• figma