Inspiration

Laundry is often a significant burden on the busy lives of college students. Up until last year, students had to pay for every load, but this year, laundry is free! So, as we began to brainstorm ideas, we had to consider the new (and old) struggles that our proposed solution had to address.

The two main new benefits that many students now enjoy are new machines and cheaper laundry, but we lost some of the features of the CSCPay app, such as keeping track of your machine cycles and seeing which machines were open.

Thus, our app was built on two pillars: bringing back those features from the CSC Pay app, as well as finding more innovative ways to make laundry a more enjoyable experience.

We brainstormed from our own experiences, recalling unclaimed laundry in messy, full laundry rooms, broken machines impossible to report, damp clothes from hour-long dryer cycles, and a barely helpful, inaccurate app.

We thought of various features → sending ping notifications to people who have yet to pick up their laundry, a streamlined reporting system for a messy or dysfunctional laundry room, ratings for the quality of machines, as well as their status, all with increased efficiency at the forefront of our ideas.

What it does

Our app has lots of features! The main ones to emphasize to users are (according to their feedback):

Sending ping notifications to remind people to pick up their laundry (if they left their laundry even after the cycle finished)
Checking machine status (which machines are yours, how long until the next one is done, etc)
Easier reporting of broken machines or things wrong in the laundry room in general

Other features that we would love to flesh out in more depth:

A points system for people who do laundry well (rewards for cleaning lint filter, leaving a clean machine, etc)
Lost & Found section
Rating machines for how well they wash/dry, how easily they tend to break
A map feature to see how busy other nearby laundry rooms are, and to switch to a different laundry room (not shown in video due to time constraints, but feel free to clone the repo and try it yourself, or you can contact us as well!)

How we built it

We began by using Figma templates to begin scaffolding our User Interface. Neither Brent nor I had used Figma before, so we used Claude to streamline the process of creating each of our features. Still, a huge learning curve was crossed with Figma as we tweaked each of the templates ourselves.

Then, we created a GitHub repo to maintain all our code for our project. We used React Native and Expo Go to visualize and build the mock-up of our mobile application. From there, we assigned each other individual pages to complete on our own, again using Claude and Cursor for speed!

Challenges we ran into

After our initial prototype, we attended DFA OH and got valuable feedback from many of the members about how we should focus on the central issue or issues we were trying to solve and how we could back those up with research.

Using tools like Figma for the first time, and paying super close attention to the design details of our app, how intuitive it was to use, and redesigning things like the home page to make it more intuitive was a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning Figma (and using Figma MCP)
Building a full frontend demo using React Native
Collecting opinions from 100+ students on campus

What we learned

Figma
Collaboration
The design process (research, prototyping, iterating)

What's next for Yaundry

Functional backend with populated student data
Collecting real-time information from laundry machines
A/B testing to flesh out UI
Testing point system (see if they actually promote good laundry behavior and loopholes for extra points)
Deploy!