UWash Laundry Service Application
In collaboration with 4 other students in the Innovation, Technology, and Design program, we were tasked with finding a problem on the University of Miami campus that ressonated with us on an emotional and personal level. We decided to tackle the issue of the faulty laundry service options, mainly targetting first and second year students.
Problem Statement:
Freshmen students living in the University of Miami residential colleges Stanford, Mahoney, and Pearson have experienced several issues regarding UM’s communal laundry rooms and the alternative laundry service, Tide Cleaners. The security of students’ belongings, disorganization of the laundry rooms, and maintenance of the laundry machines are considerable problems within UM’s communal laundry system. However, the availability of machines is the most influential. The problem with availability stems from students’ lack of respect when using the laundry equipment, as students frequently leave objects in their clothing, use poor substitutes to laundry detergent, and force open locked washers. As a result, machines break often and remain unavailable for an extended period of time. To make this easier on students, the university has supplied them with the Laundry View Monitoring System to oversee the laundry room status and see weekly machine usage. Nonetheless, the website is very outdated, currently has no relevant status updates on machines, and contains no data on machine’s weekly usage. This is especially problematic, as there are currently no quality laundry alternatives for freshmen. The Tide Cleaners’ service offers inconvenient laundry load size options and proves itself to be unreliable and overly expensive. All of these issues have built upon each other to magnify the problem. As a result, students are regularly stressed and exhausted, which hinders their overall college experience.
Problem Trip Map
Solution:
UWash is an on-campus in-dorm laundry service run by the University that keeps the laundry rooms clean, maintained, and secure and offers work-study opportunities to students. With an easy to use App, students can virtually schedule their washes and receive their clean folded laundry within 24 hours so instead of having to sit in a laundry room, students can take a load off.
Full Prototype
Deisgn Process
Full Business Plan
Investor Pitch Deck