Vishesh

8,000+ Students, Fragmented Hostel System: Why We Built

HABit

The product at a glance

At IIT Guwahati, 8,000+ students across 13 hostels relied on fragmented portals and paper logs.
HABit connected students, mess workers, and admins in one real-time ecosystem by digitizing 15,000+ daily meals and making complaints transparent.

Scope:

Campus-wide operations

My Role:

Product Designer (Coding Club)

Team:

Apratul, Aditya, Ayush

Time:

10 Months

(Q3 2025 – Q1 2026)

Deliverables:

Student Mobile App, Admin Web Portal

“

Living in a hostel with problems feels like having a flat tire and no spare.

Master’s student

120+ voices told us the same

We spoke to students, admins, and mess staff to understand why simple issues spiraled in campus. this helped in identifining connecting points:

Unreliable Feedback Loops

67%

Boarders believed their complaints either ignored or take resolution delays.

Disrupted Daily Routines

40%

Boarders reported skipping meals due to big entry lines during peak meal hours.

Less System Transparency

55%

Boarders stated they have no visibility into admin processes, or decision-making.

Skipped Figma, gained 2 weeks to improve the experience

While designing, we found two opposite audiences: one raises queries, the other resolves them. Designing for both under a tight deadline seemed impossible, so we split execution to balance empathy with rapid delivery.

High-Craft Student App (Figma)

Goal was to make the experience so seamless that problems disappear for 8000+ students.

Rapid Admin Prototype (Claude)

Admin needed functional, clean data layout dashboards to take quick actions on backlogs.

This reduces the delivery time by 1 weeks, protecting hours for high impactful flows for 8000+ student. This drastically accelerated the prototyping phase.

Student App

Solution that fixed hostel issues

Home Page

A page designed to scan hostel status within 5 seconds

High-visibility admin updates

Admin updates shown as priority alerts.

Most-used flows upfront

Appears based on requirements.

Spot favorites instantly

Pin liked items to quickly plan meals at a glance.

Food wastages stats

Increases awareness of food waste, reducing

over-serving.

Upvote the existing issue

No more repeated complaint emails.

15 Affected

Mess

13 May

Rotis were undercooked at Dinner

Several rotis served during dinner were raw in the center.

Complaint Page

Earlier when a problem occur, two things used to happen:

Students sent separate complaint emails.

Sometime they assumes someone else already reported it.

Due to this admin had to manually de-duplicate the inbox.
But why was this happening? because multiple platforms for different complaints and web-only portal required desktop logins, discouraging on-the-spot reporting.

But now, a unified complaints page

See all existing shared-space complaints

Shared spaces are:

And a seamless complaint filing flow...

QRs in shared spaces make filing complaints faster.

Select the location of the complaint

Save time by upvoting complaints

Gets notification in

Status update on the complaint page

And

when admin takes action

Open Complaint page - Click on a button "File Complaint"

Mess

From choosing a mess to managing the meals

Scan Mess QR

Mess Change

Mess Rebate & Leave

Mess Feedback

Take a meal in 2-steps: scans & show

Zero time wastage in collecting and arranging the mess cards

Earlier…

Arranging 1,000+ shuffled mess cards into holders

Admin Portal

Efficient management via a single portal

Admin needed fast tables to clear 50+ backlogged tickets every morning. Now, one portal replaces paper logs and multiple systems of hostel management.

Try Demo Prototype

To generate the portal UI, we fed our Information Architecture and Sitemap with clear interaction detail in markdown files, Tailwind design reference directly into Claude Chat. Since native Claude Design tools weren’t available that time, we prompted Claude to generate raw HTML/CSS prototypes.

Impact

Did the solution actually work?

User Rating:

Released for all 8K+ students

60%

Students preferred using the app to report issues

40%

Increase in feedback submissions compared to the past system

Learnings and key takeaways

Navigating these constraints provided valuable lessons in system architecture, cross-functional alignment, and designing for real-world user behavior.