Housing47

This project is for the Maker Track, and for the 5C Community Overlay.

Inspiration: Housing selection often creates stress and fractures friendships due to a confusing, unintuitive interface. In addition, the current housing system makes it difficult to find information on rooms and residence halls, and to have a “successful” housing draw, a student must often be “in the know” and rely on anecdotal information from upperclassmen. Negative personal experiences with the current Residence portal motivated us to develop a solution that supports collaboration and reduces anxiety.

What it does: Housing47 streamlines housing selection by providing an interactive map to filter dorms by floor, room type, air conditioning, availability, capacity, and class year eligibility; enabling roommate group(s) management for efficient collaboration; keeping room draw times private to prevent coercion. Increasing accessibility of information brings greater equity to the entire room draw process.

How we built it: Frontend: React JS—developed the core user interface; HTML & CSS—structured and styled the application for a clean look; Figma—designed and prototyped the user experience; Maptiler (JS Map API)—integrated interactive maps for room and dorm selection. Backend: JavaScript—implemented application logic and interactivity; Firebase—managed authentication, data storage, and real-time updates.

Challenges we ran into: Overcoming the limited functionality and poor UX of the existing Residence website itself to extract data; the lack of public data from Pomona leading us to manually input data for every room; couldn’t access historical data since Housing and Residence Life (HRL) is closed on weekends; integrating suites into the backend, as they work differently than normal rooms; lumping roommate groups together as one entity and ensuring the individuals’ data doesn’t conflict.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: Creating an equitable and accessible alternative to housing that looks good and allows people to connect with friends in a simple way.

What we learned: Many seemingly-minute graphical design decisions actually have an outsized effect on user interaction. It requires patience and perseverance to get through stages of the creation process that are not ‘fun,’ or seem menial, but are necessary. Good design is not just nice to have but necessary for a truly accessible and equitable selection process.

What's next for Housing47

Petitioning ASPC, Pomona administration for integration with current Residence system to allow room selection to occur through the website. Can also create functionality for people to join multiple groups with different numbers of people to allow for contingency plans if their desired room/suite is no longer available. Implement other dorms. Get clean floor plans from the HRL office.

Built With

• css
• figma
• firebase
• html
• javascript
• maptiler
• react