Campus discovery, 3D maps and community
Dormant
Filler: Dormant is a 3D map of what's happening around college campuses, starting with the University of Kansas. This case study covers how the product went from a flat event feed to a spatial home screen, and the decisions along the way.
Product Design
3D Maps
Mobile
Jump to final prototype
See it in space
Filler: events sit where they happen on a 3D campus, so distance is obvious.
Filter fast
Filler: one tap narrows the map to parties, sports, study, or food.
Know right now
Filler: live pins show what is happening this minute, not just this week.
Filler: Students at KU had no single place to see what was going on around them. Event info lived in group chats, flyers, and six different apps. Dormant puts all of it on one 3D map so the question changes from “what is happening?” to “what is happening near me, right now?”
Filler: The work covered research with students, a competitive audit, wireframes, two rounds of guerrilla testing, and a working prototype. This page walks through the before-and-after, the core explore interaction, and the onboarding flow that gets a new user onto the map in under a minute.
Before and after
Filler: Toggle between the first pass and the current direction. The list was familiar but told students nothing about proximity or density. The map makes both obvious without reading a single card.
Before
Flat list. No sense of where anything is.
Starting point
Filler: the first pass was a chronological feed of campus events. Students could not tell what was close, what was crowded, or what was happening right now without opening every card.
Core interaction
Filler: Try the filters and tap a pin. The map and the side panel stay in sync so a student never loses their place. Categories were chosen from interview data; the real set will likely change.
Nearby
First run
Filler: Step through the flow. Interests picked in step two seed the first map view, so the app feels useful before the user has done anything else. The steps on the right unlock as you go.
Step 1 of 4
Pick your campus
Filler: one campus to start, more later.
Strong Design Insight
Areas for Improvement
Filler: Students understood the map metaphor immediately; no one asked what the pins meant.
Filler: Category names felt too narrow. Several testers wanted a catch-all for club events.
Filler: The bottom sheet kept people on the map instead of bouncing to a detail page.
Filler: 3D tilt was disorienting on first load. A flatter default angle is worth testing.
Filler: Onboarding took under a minute for every tester.
Filler: Location permission copy needs to explain the benefit before asking.
Guerrilla testing
Filler tester 1
Filler tester 2
Filler tester 3
