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.
My Role:
Product Designer (Coding Club)
Team:
Apratul, Aditya, Ayush
Time:
10 Months
(Q3 2025 – Q1 2026)
Deliverables:
Student Mobile App, Admin Web Portal
Scope:
Campus-wide operations
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:
We identified:
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.
Solution that fixed hostel issues
Student App
Home Page
A page designed to scan hostel status within 5 seconds
Home
Mess
Complaints
High-visibility admin updates
Admin updates shown as priority alerts.
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.
Complaint Page
Earlier when a problem occur, three things used to happen:
Students sent separate complaint emails, some assumed someone else already reported it, and the hostel admin had to manually de-duplicate the inbox. Why? because:
Multiple platforms for different complaints.
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 "File Complaint"
Mess
From choosing a mess to managing the meals
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
Admin needed fast tables to clear 50+ backlogged tickets every morning. Now, one portal replaces paper logs and multiple systems of hostel management.
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.
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.
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
