Final Product

After lots of iteration, we finally created this: the Brown Housing Portal.

The login screen to an administration curated Housing Portal for students and RPL's

. This is what a student profile would look like. The main function of this page is to centralize and organize basic student information. It provides an intuitive way for students to initiate paperwork and get accommodations by pressing Add and waiting for administrator approval. Visually, we wanted to keep everything simple, with lots of whitespace and one main accent color that matches Brown’s design language.

Any relevant paperwork that goes along with an accommodation initiated in the Profile would appear in the student’s To-Do list. Once a form is approved, the corresponding change would show up in the student's profile in the Approved column, and the student would receive a Brown email notification. In this way, currently hard-to-find PDF forms appear automatically and in one place. Administrators can keep better track of all submitted forms and can also get better engagement with polls and surveys by adding them to students’ To Do lists.

Some forms might be PDFs, and some forms might be built into the site and stylized for simplicity and efficiency, like this version of the Housing Lottery form.

The second part of our design is an interactive housing map. Because the housing lottery is so stressful and fast-paced, we wanted to keep everything minimalistic and intuitive. In the building view, students can filter for buildings that meet particular specifications, like kitchens, single gender housing, and non-greek housing. Students can also filter for quality by the way a room is rated in a particular category, like noise. We kept administrators in mind here by only allowing one of these quality filters at a time, preventing students from being dissatisfied by the lack of rooms with perfect scores.

Hovering over a building immediately shows the building’s basic information, and how many of the rooms in it are still available.

Clicking a building takes the student to the floor view. Here, they can switch between floors, and hover over rooms to see images of them, and how they’ve been rated in particular categories in the past. These ratings would be compiled from (slightly modified) room reviews that students all currently submit and promptly forget about. Students can also save rooms that they like. As we can see, our user has saved one room on this floor….

… which shows up here, so they can easily refer to it during the Lottery.

Finally, we wanted to play with what an RPL’s profile would look like in the system. Here, the RPL’s page would have an extra tab for their residents. They’d be able to look at their floor visually and mouse over rooms or use the search bar to look up their residents and their basic information like preferred pronouns or allergies. They could also submit reports to their Community Directors. This page would replace the Excel spreadsheets currently given to RPL's to keep track of their floors.

Conclusion

Our UI solution to the issues we saw essentially relied on building flexible models for two parts of the existing system: bureaucratic information flow and management (Profile & To-Do) and housing information access and management (Interactive Map). Our main priorities were to create a system that was intuitively learnable, and relied on existing conceptual models of online profiles and to do lists. Our map utilizes existing data- like room reports, building maps and floor plans- to create a tool that improves the quality of information students have access to when choosing their own housing, and the speed with which they can sift through this information during (and before) the fast paced Lottery. Ultimately, our UI benefits all 3 of our personas- the students and RPL's who benefit most directly from the streamlined system, and the administrators and Community Directors who are able to keep track of student information, pending paperwork, room conditions, and occupancy in a visual manner while reducing strain on Residential Life and Facilities staff due to questions and complaints.

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