Individual project · 2026
Ruum.
Rethinking how Rutgers students find housing and roommates.
- Role
- UX researcher & designer
- Platform
- Mobile app
- Tools
- Figma
- Timeline
- 2 months
The problem
Off-campus housing at Rutgers is scattered, competitive, and full of scams.
There are too many listings across too many apps, too many people competing for the same places with no way to see that competition, and sites like Facebook Marketplace are oversaturated with scams. The roommate pool is huge, but there’s no central hub to find or coordinate with them.
The solution
One app for the whole search, built on four features.
- Every listing in one place. Listings from across the web, consolidated into one feed, and clear about where each one came from.
- NetID login. Requiring a Rutgers NetID keeps out scams and fake listings.
- See your competition. Metrics show how many other students are interested in a listing, and how fast that interest is growing.
- Roommates, built into the search. Profiles put living habits and housing preferences first, so finding people and finding a place happen together.
The process
No two students searched the same way. Fragmentation is the core problem.
- Competitive analysis
- User survey (n=5)
- Structured interviews
I audited the six platforms Rutgers students use for housing: Places4Students, RentCollegePads (which powers offcampushousing.rutgers.edu, now part of StarRez), Facebook Marketplace and Groups, Zillow, and Apartments.com.
Then I surveyed Rutgers students on platform usage, pain points, scam exposure, and the features they’d want.
- 5 of 5
- used a different main platform
- 100%
- would trust a platform more with NetID login
- 0 of 4
- were sure they’d never run into a scam
- 5.00
- rating for “see who else is interested,” the top feature
Also heard
- Students called the search “super competitive.” Urgency and no transparency were the biggest frustrations.
- Subleases and lease takeovers are almost entirely unserved by official platforms, pushing urgent deals onto Facebook and Snapchat.
Survey results. Click any chart to enlarge.
Four problems to solve: fragmentation, invisible competition, scams, and a scattered roommate pool.
Fragmentation
Listings are scattered across platforms that don’t talk to each other: Places4Students, Facebook, Zillow, Snapchat and the official Rutgers portal. Students juggle several apps at once, with no single source of truth.
Places4Students 
Apartments.com 
Zillow 
Rutgers off-campus housing Competition
The market is fierce, but students can’t see it. There’s no way to tell how many people are looking at a listing, how fast interest is growing, or where you stand.
The only signal is comments on posts. But plenty of people DM without commenting, and posters rarely reply, so you never know who actually got in touch.
Facebook Groups 
Facebook Groups Scams
Facebook Marketplace and similar sites are flooded with fake listings. With no verification, students can’t reliably tell a real listing from a scam.
Facebook Marketplace 
Facebook Marketplace Roommates
The roommate pool at Rutgers is huge, but there’s no central place to find, filter or coordinate with roommates alongside the housing search.
Verified sites have tiny pools, comments get little engagement, and Snapchat stories disappear in 24 hours. Matching roommates to places means coordinating everything by hand.
Rutgers portal: 3 roommate profiles 
Places4Students roommates 
Snapchat stories
My goal: one app that solves all four.
Sketching turned four problems into nine features.
Core features
- Listing aggregation and deduplication
- The competition layer
- Interest and comments on each listing
- Sublease and lease takeover listings
- Utility transparency
- Price negotiability
- A tag-based profile system
- Roommate discovery
- Design system decisions
Explore and listing sketches 
Roommate sketches
From sketches to mid-fi wireframes, then a full hi-fi system.
Mid-fi
Placeholder images and copy let me test the structure first: the saved-listings carousel, interest metrics on each listing, and roommate profiles built around tags.
Hi-fi
Then color, type and components, built into a design system and applied across every screen.
Design system 
Hi-fi screens
The tags and saved carousel landed. One gesture needed a fix.
- Think-aloud usability tests
- 2 Rutgers students
Both students responded positively overall, with the tag system and the saved-listings carousel standing out as the strongest features.
What worked
- The tag system’s inclusive, categorized options. One tester compared it to matching on a dating app.
- Saved listings as the first thing on the home screen was immediately understood.
- Social transparency, like visible profile activity and average landlord response time.
What to fix
- Both testers swiped down to close the tag picker instead of tapping out.
They asked for
- Student-to-student reviews, not just landlord reviews.
- Deal-breaker and pet peeve tags for finer roommate filtering.