The Challenge
College freshmen face one of the most significant social transitions of their lives: leaving behind their support networks and learning to coexist with a complete stranger in a cramped dorm room. Yet the tools available to help them find that stranger, social media platforms, group chats, and generic institutional portals, are not built for the job.
If incoming freshmen are not given a better way to connect with potential roommates on a deeper, more truthful level, students will continue to report that their roommate negatively affected their GPA and mental health. A compatible roommate provides an immediate support system during one of the most demanding transitions in a young adult's life, and students deserve a tool designed specifically for that purpose.
Goals
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Goal 1: Eliminate the Popularity Contest
Existing social media platforms reward users who post frequently and whose profiles attract the most attention. NEEDLE replaces this open, competitive dynamic with an algorithm-driven matching system that ensures every user receives compatible matches regardless of how many followers they have.
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Goal 2: Encourage Honest, Deeper Self-Disclosure
Rather than allowing users to craft any persona they choose, NEEDLE prompts them through a structured 40-question survey across four categories: Hobbies & Interests, Living Expectations, Communication Skills, and Collegiate Goals. This design nudges users toward honest, specific answers that are genuinely useful to potential roommates.
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Goal 3: Reduce Awkwardness in Initial Conversations
One of the most consistent pain points across user interviews was the anxiety of reaching out to a total stranger online. NEEDLE addresses this with built-in conversation prompts — structured icebreakers that give matches a starting point and lower the social barrier to first contact.​​
Research & Analysis
Before designing anything, the team audited the five platforms that incoming freshmen most commonly rely on to find roommates. The audit revealed a consistent structural gap: every platform provides a channel for communication, but none provides a mechanism for matching. Students are left to sort through the noise on their own.
Without a proper matching system in place, these platforms create a two-tier outcome: some students are overwhelmed with responses, while others receive none. Social media optimizes for engagement and popularity, not compatibility. NEEDLE was conceived as a direct response to this gap — a platform whose sole purpose is accurate, fair roommate matching.
Personas & User Research
The team conducted semi-structured interviews with eight JMU students (P1–P8) who had recently navigated the freshman roommate selection process. Participants represented a range of majors, dorm styles (hall-style, Jack and Jill), and roommate outcomes — from lasting friendships to complete relationship breakdowns. Interviews were conducted over Zoom, in person in campus dining halls and libraries, and by phone. All sessions were recorded or transcribed.
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Interview questions were organized into three phases: background (academic year, dorm, major), process (which platforms they used, what frustrated them, what worked), and product validation (reactions to potential features, including conversation prompts, personality tests, and inactivity limits).
Findings & Implementation
Data from all eight participant interviews was organized on a Miro board and synthesized into an empathy map capturing what users say, think, do, and feel during the roommate selection process. Several recurring themes emerged:
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• Participants who used social media felt like they were posting into a void — they either got too many replies or none at all.
• The JMU Housing Portal was valued for its survey component but criticized for its lack of push notifications, opaque EID-only usernames, and no profile photos.
• Multiple participants reported that even when living habits matched, unknown communication styles led to relationship deterioration (P2, P3, P4).
• Several participants wished they had known how often their roommate would be in the room, their study habits, and their conflict resolution approach before moving in.
• When asked about conversation prompts (e.g., 'If you were stuck on an island, what 3 items would you bring?'), The majority of participants said it would reduce awkwardness.
• Personality tests (Big Five, Myers-Briggs) were seen as worthwhile by most participants, even if time-consuming.
Prototyping Journey
Low-Fidelity (Lo-Fi): Initial wireframes covered four core task flows: answering a new message, completing the matching survey, exploring matches, and editing a profile. Lo-fi testing with three participants revealed that the original color palette felt dated and the bottom navigation was unclear. Participants also noted excessive negative space on the match-exploration screen.
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High-Fidelity (Hi-Fi): The team updated to a brighter purple palette, replaced blocky UI elements with organic shapes, added a percentage-based survey progress indicator, introduced a school email verification flow (with troubleshooting guidance), and redesigned the matches page to surface more profile information at a glance.
Conclusion and Future Direction
NEEDLE began as a semester-long academic project and evolved into a genuine attempt to solve a problem that affects hundreds of thousands of incoming college students every year. Through user interviews, competitive analysis, iterative prototyping, and usability testing, the team validated that the core hypothesis is sound: incoming freshmen need a purpose-built matching platform, not a repurposed social media channel.
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The design process surfaced a critical insight about social media: these platforms are optimized for popularity, not compatibility. NEEDLE inverts that dynamic — the algorithm does the heavy lifting so that every user gets a fair shot at a compatible match, regardless of how photogenic their post is or how many followers they have.
Opportunities for Future Development
• Improve SUS score from 67.5 toward 80+ through navigation fixes and profile setup UX improvements identified in testing.
• Explore dynamic color theming — adapting the interface color palette to each enrolled institution (e.g., JMU purple, UVA orange, etc.).
• Research 'explore matches' UI patterns from consumer dating apps (Hinge, Tinder) to enrich the profile card format.
• Investigate how NEEDLE's matching model could scale beyond traditional college freshmen, transfer students, graduate housing, and co-op placements.
• Implement two-factor authentication (DUO Mobile, OKTA) for stronger identity verification tied to actual enrollment status.
• Commission a full accessibility audit, including screen reader testing (VoiceOver, TalkBack), before any public beta release.