StudentBase
Product Strategist & Designer
Overview
StudentBase is a pre-seed startup reimagining the student rental experience. Designed for university towns, the platform brings together students, landlords, and institutions into one ecosystem to streamline the yearly rental cycle. The goal: to reduce fragmentation and stress in a process that's often chaotic and outdated.
My Role
Product Strategist and Product Designer
Frameworks
Design Thinking, Lean UX, Product Roadmapping
Problem Statement
Finding student housing is stressful, fragmented, and often unsafe. Students juggle listings, leases, and landlords across disconnected platforms. Landlords waste hours on manual tasks, and universities lack visibility into the off-campus housing experience.
The Solution
StudentBase brings together students, landlords, and universities into a single, integrated platform built to simplify the rental experience from end to end. We designed a multi-portal iPad app with tailored user flows for each group:
Key Features
Students get access to verified listings, flexible rent payment options, and simplified lease management all from one place.
Landlords can upload listings, review applications and manage leases. Real-time updates, online lease agreemnts and payment options in one place.
Universities can monitor housing trends, manage verified listings, and support students more effectively. Real-time analytics and co-branded experiences help improve student satisfaction while reducing administrative overhead.
Process
User & Market Research
The challenge was to identify the pain points that students had when availing rental services and finding a solution that meets all their needs and mitigates the pain points.
User Interviews
I began by gathering direct feedback from fellow students navigating the rental process. By walking through the process myself and documenting challenges at each stage, I uncovered friction points around trust, verification, and communication.
Market
I researched and reviewed campus housing portals at other universities to benchmark features, discover gaps, and identify best practices. This analysis helped confirm that problems were not unique to our campus, but widespread across student housing markets.
Key Findings
60% students struggle to find verified listings on platforms.
Students fall victim to scams causing financial and emotional stress.
Landlords have difficulty processing leases within a timely manner.
Universities have Insufficient infrastructure to handle housing needs.
User Persona
Research directly shaped the platform’s core features and user flows, ensuring StudentBase addressed the real needs of all market participants.
Alex Chen Undergraduate Student, 20
- Goals: Find safe, affordable housing; save time; avoid scams
- Pain Points: Unverified listings, hard-to-reach landlords, risk of losing deposit
- Needs: Verified listings, simple applications, secure payments
Mike Patterson Landlord/Property Owner, 36
- Goals: Fill vacancies quickly, simplify management, ensure reliable payments
- Pain Points: Tenant screening, slow communication, risk of late payments
- Needs: Easy listing tools, direct communication, automated rent collection
Journey mapping
To understand the student housing experience end-to-end, I mapped out each step in the journey—from searching for listings to moving in. Using interview findings and firsthand experience, I identified friction points such as unclear listing verification, slow communications, and application confusion. This journey map became the foundation for prioritizing features, simplifying onboarding, and creating more transparent, user-friendly flows.
- Student flow
- Landlord flow
- University flow
Design System
2. myBombardier
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1. Roadmap
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Prototypes
3. myBombardier
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- myMaintenance – A mobile app for aircraft maintenance teams
- myBombardier (Partnership )
Wireframes
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Low-fidelity
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Final Design
High-fidelity
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Outcomes
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Reflection
This internship helped shape how I think about building scalable, user-first products. I learned how to lead design through ambiguity, align with engineering and product goals, and balance MVP scope with user impact. It also deepened my interest in product management as a career path.
- myMaintenance – A mobile app for aircraft maintenance teams
- myService – A customer support app launched on the App Store
- myBombardier (Partnership Portal) – A new internal platform to manage third-party partnerships and ad campaigns
Next Steps
- myMaintenance – A mobile app for aircraft maintenance teams
- myService – A customer support app launched on the App Store
- myBombardier (Partnership Portal) – A new internal platform to manage third-party partnerships and ad campaigns