Dormly

There are over 6,000 undergraduate students enrolled at the University of Rochester. In 2023, over 70% of these students lived On-Campus, and more than 60% of students state that the location in which they live is very important. Considering the importance of the topic, and the Housing Process for Upperclassmen is under-developed and difficult to use.

*How can the University increase the discoverability of resources so that current and prospective students can more easily accesses information regarding housing?*

As a Team Lead of the User Experience Design Organization at the University of Rochester, I pitched the idea to design a platform to answer this question. My goal is to create a comprehensive platform where users can research housing options, search for roommates, and register with an improved user flow that prioritizes the user experience. In the end, creating a cohesive source of housing information for current and prospective students alike.

Check out the Figma prototype below! (It may take some time for all images to load.)

After selecting my team of UX Designers, we began the design process.

Through discussions with my team members and my own experiences as a student, we identified our core users as the people who are directly interacting with the housing portal, for example the undergraduate student population and Residential Advisors.

Secondary Users are people who would interact with the Housing System itself less frequently, but are still directly involved with the site such as Housing Staff and IT.

With our user base in mind, we began the discovery phase.

My team and I conducted a total of 10 interviews with University students of various class years as well as special positions, such as Residential Advisors, or 5th year students. We asked participants to describe their preparedness levels and previous interactions with the Housing Lottery, as well as what they liked and disliked with their interactions.

Our goals of our research were to:
- Identify the current methods in which students gathered information regarding the housing allocation.
- Discover pain points with the current system, specifically in areas that lacked visual clarity and repetitive or unintuitive user flows.
- Determine what possible gains that could be provided through additional features.

This information was gathered and organized:

We then organized these findings into solutions that could be implemented:

With our requirements defined, we began to create how our solutions would look.

With the navigation bar being the base of navigation, I split our main functionalities, into the problems that they would solve with the Onboarding supplementing the profile creation.

Using Whiteboards, our team rapidly ideated sketches for different screens, transferring the mockups to Figma.

• Stay focused on the problems you came to solve. During many discussions, we talked about the introduction of new features, and we needed to be reminded of our primary objective, which was the enhancement of the housing registration user flow. Stay focused on your main objectives, or the core value of your idea will suffer.
• "Teamwork" is more than just working with a team. As the Team Lead, I quickly learned the difference between working with a group, and working with a cohesive, collaborative team. It was role to foster an environment where each team member's strengths and perspectives were aligned in one shared vision.
• Time is a resource! Allocate it well! There were lots of points during the process that I needed to learn how to move on. There are many different parts to the design process, and its important to realize which ones are worth spending time on. For example, I think I spent too much time in ideating new ideas, rather than running more testing on our core functionality. I think this was my biggest takeaway as a Team Lead, and will help influence my design process thinking in future projects.

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Overall, this project was a really informative experience, both from a design perspective, but also a Team Lead perspective as well. There were ups and downs, but I learned a lot about my leadership style, as well as how to work with a team of designers.