Yaundromat

Yaundromat gives Yalies a live view of their laundry room—making it easier to find available machines, track loads, and standardize laundry etiquette.

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Inspiration

  • Yale laundry rooms can be frustrating to navigate, especially when machines are full, cycle timing is unclear, or finished laundry gets moved.
  • In conversations with 15 Yale students, I found that:
    • 93.3% had tried to do laundry when all machines were taken.
    • 80% had moved somebody else’s laundry.
    • 66.7% had felt unsure whether it was okay to move someone else’s laundry.
  • I wanted to design a solution that gave students more visibility into a shared laundry space while also creating clearer norms around finished loads.
  • I also wanted the experience to feel more inviting and playful than a traditional utility app.

What it does

  • Yaundromat gives students a live view of their Yale laundry room in a “gamified” style.
  • Students can:
    • See which washers and dryers are available
    • View machines spatially through a map-based interface
    • Switch to a list view for faster filtering and sorting
    • Track machine states such as Available, Running, Almost Done, Pickup Period, and Okay to Move
    • See how much time is left on a cycle
    • Know how long a finished load has been sitting
    • Follow a standardized grace period, based on majority votes from my student-poll, before laundry becomes okay to move.
    • See where moved laundry has been placed
  • The goal is to make laundry more transparent and predictive

How I built it

  • Started with personal experience to identify the biggest recurring pain points
  • Conducted 15 conversations with Yale students and used the results to narrow the problem
  • Brainstormed different ways to represent a laundry room, including list-based and map-based interfaces
  • Sketched early wireframes by hand before moving into higher-fidelity prototyping
  • Developed a mobile-first PWA using:
    • Next.js
    • TypeScript
    • Tailwind CSS
    • Framer Motion
  • Built a visual identity around Yale-inspired navy tones, Yale-specific fonts, rounded forms, and liquid-glass-inspired UI.

Challenges I ran into

  • Balancing a playful, gamified map with usability when laundry rooms contain many machines
  • Making multiple machine states immediately understandable without overwhelming the user
  • Thinking through how to determine when laundry has actually been removed from a machine
  • Making the app feel Yale-specific
  • Keeping the experience simple on mobile while still supporting filters, sorting, lots of details, and a complex map

What I learned

  • The biggest laundry frustrations are not only about the machines themselves, but about coordination between people sharing them
  • Good service design often means creating shared norms and implementing them
  • Spatial interfaces can be useful but have to be paired with easy-to-understand information, especially when the data is complex
  • Research helped distinguish which problems were worth solving through software and which were primarily hardware-related

What's next for Yaundromat

  • Add laundry planning and history:
    • Past laundry sessions
    • Custom reminders
    • Suggested lower-traffic times
  • Add anonymous preset nudges such as:
    • “Could you pick this up?”
    • “I’m on my way.”
    • “There in 5 minutes.”
  • Explore optional mutual chat between users.
  • Add positive reinforcement for timely pickup:
    • Residential-college challenges.
    • Yale based rewards
  • Add QR codes in laundry rooms so students can instantly open the correct room in the PWA.

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