Our service not only aims to increase the number of dorm residents but also encourages students to continue living in dorms into their second year.
"We believe in empowering students with practical tools and habits that enable them to thrive in shared living environments, helping them to succeed in any collaborative space or community."
Simple guide to go through the app features and get started! By linking to the student's school information, Dormbo could easily link their profile in a few seconds.
Dormitory Rules provides step-by-step guidance for setting shared cleaning schedules, ensuring everyone’s needs are heard and respected.
Students can track and complete tasks based on shared dorm rules, with roommate confirmation keeping everyone accountable.
Students can exchange help requests within the dorm, earning points and building stronger roommate bonds through collaboration.
Students confirm completed tasks on the 'Confirm Your Roommate' page, promoting mutual accountability and transparency.
On the Completed page, students can view roommate-verified tasks and claim earned points, encouraging them to complete their own tasks or help others.
tudents can view both dorm and individual rankings, then redeem points for rewards—keeping them motivated and engaged in dorm life.
Students can view linked school accounts and point redemption history to easily track their participation and earned rewards.
Living with a “ bad ” roommate, you might have...
Research Goal
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall experiences of students living in the United States including contributions and challenges
Interestingly, on-campus residents make up less than half of the first-year student population — a surprising insight that suggests students may be less inclined to choose dormitory living.
After conducting secondary research and preliminary user interviews, we observed that first-time dorm residents struggled the most with adapting to shared responsibilities. Many had no prior experience living with roommates and were adjusting to life away from family support, which led to more frequent conflicts due to differing lifestyles. As a team, we synthesized these findings and decided to focus our design efforts on this specific group to create more targeted and effective solutions.
Throughout our survey with 55 responses and 12 participants for interviews to gather deeper insights into students' needs and concerns.
Our goal was twofold
These methods allowed us to better understand the nuances of their challenges and uncover potential solutions that align with their priorities and preferences.
To uncover real roommate dynamics, we interviewed 10 students and 2 Resident Assistants (RAs) living on campus. While students shared firsthand struggles in shared living spaces, RAs revealed the daily challenges of mediating conflicts — giving us a fuller picture of dorm life from both sides.
These conversations not only surfaced common pain points but also helped us understand why existing support systems often fall short — and where design could make a real difference.
Synthesizing what we heard, we built a journey map to surface patterns in student struggles and opportunities for design to intervene.
1. Roommate Conflicts: Users experience frustration when the preferences they select in their roommate matching questionnaire do not align with the characteristics of their assigned roommates.
2. Unsuccessful Open Discussions: Users feel disheartened after attempting open communication with their roommates, only to find that their efforts do not result in any meaningful changes or resolutions.
3. Seeking Help from RAs: Users report feeling awkward and more strained in their roommate relationships after seeking assistance from RA, as these interventions often fail to resolve conflicts effectively and instead exacerbate tension.
Our primary research surfaced recurring themes in student struggles. To turn these insights into action, we crafted three “How Might We” questions — a launchpad for ideation that helped us reframe challenges and spark solution-driven thinking around dorm relationships.
“Students need to learn how to get along with roommates who have different lifestyles”
Problem Statement
These gaps open the door for us to design a more effective solution.
From our understanding, it is clear to see that all of them do well on task creation, task tracking, getting some kinds of rewards, and rule setting. However, they are weak on in-app onboarding, offering and creating help to talk to each other, and ranking & rewards,which are our unique points. Another unique feature inspired by Instagram-style status sharing. Students can post their current status — such as "sleeping" — so their roommates are aware and can act more considerately.
🔵 No service or app is currently addressing how students collaborate on a daily basis, build cohesive relationships, or foster personal growth and character development within their living environments. That's why we want to collaborate with schools to foster a comprehensive dorm and campus experience.
Based on our previous research, we categorized and summarized the insights using Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ultimately identifying 8 user needs. Since lower-level needs are more essential, we selected three critical needs as user goals：
The insights gathered from the sensory cue test directly informed the core features of our app. By understanding what students associate with supportive and harmonious dorm life, we translated those emotional and sensory triggers into tangible design decisions.
We mapped out the site map of the mobile app based on the prioritized features discussed above, which serves as the framework for designing high-fidelity products in the later stage.
Our task flow for the participants is to create an overall experience from the first day living in the dorm, set up rules, and task arrangements & implement them to receive awards, and achieve shared goals for a better dorm environment.
Based on the low-fi wireframes and feedback from our tester, we transformed low-fidelity sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes, which set a solid foundation for usability testing. In this stage, We did two rounds of tests to make sure our mid-fidelity designs made sense before moving into high-fidelity prototypes
After the test, we used a post survey to let them rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-5 to meet user goals, they rated relatively low on supporting- physical health and fostering a sense of belonging. What we did well was treating others fairly and having positive relationships.
Our second round of testing was a significant success, with each task achieving a success rate of over 95%. Users found that the clean and colorful UI really made them want to use it, the UX writing is clear and intuitive, and the rewards give them motivation to finish cleaning tasks and help others.
Let’s take a look at how our service works.
“We believe in empowering students with practical tools and habits that enable them to thrive in shared living environments, helping them to succeed in any collaborative space or community”
Mastering Logical Problem-Solving
Design started to feel like a logical puzzle to me — not just about making things look good, but figuring out how people think, feel, and interact. I’ve learned that it’s not just about the final solution, but how you get there. The real value is in the process — understanding users, testing ideas, and learning from each step. That’s what makes a solution not only smart, but truly meaningful and human.
I embraced evidence-based design as my North Star
I moved away from relying on gut feeling — every design decision became a well-reasoned argument grounded in data and research. I started thinking like a data scientist, focused on creating solutions that not only look good, but are smart, measurable, and rooted in real user insight.
