fristrations

website//product guide

Fristrations is an iOS app I coded with 4 friends in Spring 2016. It is a room reservation system for Princeton's Student Campus Center called Frist. Frist is home to classes, extracurriculars and students studying, and we wanted to create a simple lightweight way to manage room management and reservations. I executed the mockups, implemented all front end work and created the router data visualization.

When I was designing Fristrations, my key focus was the user experience. Navigation is enabled via the tabs at the bottom of the app. To check for available rooms, you can either browse from the landing screen, check for available rooms, save favorites and reservations, or find extra information in the more tab.

An original pain point for Fristrations was that it would not be useful unless students downloaded it and everyone used it. (Otherwise people would just walk in on people who hadn't reserved rooms). The solution to this was to partner with Princeton's IT department to access all the wifi routers in the building and generate a visualization of where students are. The number of devices connected to each router is updated every 5 minutes. I was responsible for conveying this visualization in the app. This enables students to see and avoid crowded areas.

Another emphasis for this app was ease of use. I therefore designed the implementation as tap-to-book. I wrote a script that pre-scrapes the course registrar for classes and fill those into our Firebase database. Student can subsequently book around these classes. We show you your school id if you have booked the room, and if it someone else, we simply show the room as "Reserved."

We tested our app by giving it to random students with no explanation to see it usage was intuitive. Every student was shocked by how easy it was to reserve rooms - each was successful in booking a room.

Learn more at fristrations.xyz.

Click here to see the Fristrations Product Guide.