How I helped students onboard a brand new platform to find housing near campuses & building an intuitive user flow.
COMPANY
Plazio (aka Housing Hawk)
TIMELINE
Feb. - Sept. 2025
ROLE
Product + ux/ui designer
TOOLKIT
Figma, Tailwind CSS, JS, Google workspace
CONTEXT
WHAT IS PLAZIO?
Plazio is a web platform that helps students find housing near their campuses. It features a streamlined leasing experience, a roommate matching tool, and a landlord dashboard.
As the sole designer in a lean startup, I created the full style guide and implemented new streamlined workflow to accelerate delivery.
DISCOVERY
Our internal review with the development team revealed that several components in the product were too complex to implement within the project timeline.
We grouped these challenges into two categories:
Technical complexity
"We don't have enough time in the day to ship these components."
"Could you possibly make the drop-downs a bit simpler?"
Design vision
"Why is there red on the search button?"
"Let's change the font-family used here so they match the designs."
PROBLEM 1
In the lean startup environment, completing sprints every week was necessary.
Despite being the only designer in the team, I was still out-pacing the developers in our development pipeline.
THE CHALLENGE
The components were too complex/ambitious. After review, the dev team concluded that there would be too many time constraints to effectively develop each one.
It was ideal to make the coding part of the project as fast as possible, while maintaining a clean and functional UI.
MY SOLUTION
To address these issues and improve efficiency, we decided to change our development pipeline with help from external tools.
PROCESS
Before
Raw dropdown components from Radix.
Raw segmented options components from Radix.
After
Edited version of the dropdown menus.
Edited version of the segmented options.
RESULTS
Our updated workflow let developers focus on engineering while resolving design vision gaps.
Instead of handing off raw Figma files, I shipped styled code blocks alongside the designs.
This cut down the time devs spent on styling and gave me more control over the final product’s look and feel.
FIXES
~50%
Fewer visual QA fixes needed before release
PRODUCT SHIPPING
2X
Faster design-to-code handoff.
TIME ON TASK
40%
Reduction in dev time spent on styling.