Futon

Inspiration:

As college students, we are given the opportunity to not only engage in exciting new environments, but also find and define our own communities. Doing so, we are able to learn more from the larger academic community, and expand our perspective of the world around us. One way we can do so is to connect with students and attend events at other campuses. To fulfill this mission, we would need to tackle one of the major issues - accommodation during visits to college campuses.

Problem:

To address this problem, we ask: How can we make inter-collegiate opportunities more accessible to students? How can we connect students with other students who are open to host them in campus dorms during their visits? How do we increase the number of options for accommodation available to college students while also addressing the safety concerns that come with it? Our solution addresses these questions in the form of a full-stack application catered towards the average college students who are looking for a place to stay during their visits and wants to minimize their costs.

What it does:

Introducing … Futon! Combining homestay-style dorm database, compatibility matchmaking, and social networking functionalities, the app provides students a both a means to connect with others through hosting mutuals within their expanded friends network, and also through finding a place to stay while attending academic and on-campus events without cost. Users can create a host profile and post their room on the map, along with details regarding facilities and accommodations that they can offer. On the other end, finders also make their profile, look at room postings around college campuses, and request to stay at locations. By using mutuals as a means of introduction and contact, we ensure the safety and trust between the host and the finder, while allowing the opportunity for new friendships and connections to form!

How we built it:

Our process follows the principles of user-centric, human-centric design. We started off with identifying and proposing the core issue that we want to solve. We then sent out a survey to ask with a user-flow diagram in FigJam, followed by lo-fi and hi-fi wireframes in Figma. After creating a complete mock-up, we began the development of the application using Swift, SwiftUI, and Supabase. By leveraging different technologies and libraries (Kingfisher, WrappingHStack, ...) and creating various custom components, we designed and created a full-stack application that closely aligned with our initial problem, our user research survey data, and addressed all the criteria of accessibility (ease of use), completeness, impact, originality, and presentation. We incorporated our app with a structured backend in Supabase, including tables such as users that allow user registration and authentication, and requests that handle host and guest requests.

User Research:

In two hours, we carried out a survey to identify our customer base and understand users' needs:

• 85% of participants visited another college in the past year
• 70% of participants said they stay over at their friend's dorm when going to a college event
• 60% of participants said not being able to find accommodation hinders their travel plans
• On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being no concerns at all, 78% of participants answered 7 or above in being comfortable with staying overnight in a mutual's (friend of friend's) dorm. Because the data collected suggests a demand for our solution, we designed and developed an app to address these guidelines.

User Flow:

Click link to view!

Wireframe:

Click link to view!

Figma Prototype:

Click link to view!

Github Repository:

Click link to view!

Challenges we ran into:

• Trying a new tech stack - Supabase and SwiftUI combo for the first time. none of us had ever done server networking on an iOS app before
• Time constraints
• Refining the idea to cater toward the right audience - less “corporate design” → this is why we customized all of our own components to fit our younger demographic
• Breaking changes on XCode → a lot of errors to fix
• No time for auth: instead, we simulated “logging in” with querying the server with an email address and returning a corresponding user object
• Need to fully integrate finer features like the upcoming calendar

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

• Made an app with a totally new tech stack!
• Performed all steps of a product design process within 24 hours
• Provided a solution catered to a specific audience that will help enhance their educational experiences

What we learned:

• Following the UX & UI design process from identifying problems, performing user research, creating user flow, wire-framing, to prototyping and make the project code-ready.
• Making a functional Swift app starting with an idea from scratch.
• Facilitating communication between a frontend / backend - especially with a new technology - Supabase.
• Communication and dividing tasks for a group project in such a short amount of time

What's next for Futon:

• Implement compatibility matches using machine learning algorithms
• Connect with the LinkedIn and Instagram APIs to gather user’s mutuals.
• We want to keep things accessible. So the way we monetize Futon will be exclusively through user recommendations and corporate partnerships.
• We’ll serve as an intermediary between booking cheap tickets, and finding bites to eat.
• We’ll create a dashboard for Corporate partners to post their events all over the map.

Built With

• figjam
• figma
• supabase
• swift
• swiftui