Pinpoint

Connecting UC Davis Students to Their Lost Treasure

The Problem We All Know Too Well

Picture this: you’re rushing to your organic chemistry midterm when you realize your AirPods are missing. Panic sets in. Where do you even start looking? Check the gym? Post on Facebook? Wander around campus hoping for the best?

At UC Davis, this scenario plays out hundreds of times each day. Our research revealed a shocking reality: 78% of students surveyed had no idea that campus lost-and-found services even existed. Those who did know faced a fragmented maze of different departments, random bulletin boards, and desperate Snapchat stories.

The result? Countless valuable items gathering dust in storage rooms while students buy expensive replacements, and good Samaritans holding onto found items with nowhere reliable to report them.

Meet the Team Behind the Solution

PinPoint emerged from UC Davis CodeLab’s 2024–2025 cohort, where 12 dedicated students spent a full year transforming this frustration into a comprehensive platform that actually works.

Our Team:

• Project Manager: Vrinda Bansal
• Developers: Nandini Baruah, Ian Yoo, Adisesh Venkatesh Sanklapur, Jason Peng, Shashwat Mahalanobis
• Designers: Jasmine Gonzalez Pacheco, Aidan Chiang

What made our approach unique was having both designers and developers conduct user research from day one, ensuring our technical decisions were grounded in real user needs rather than assumptions.

Research That Changed Everything

Before writing a single line of code, we dove deep into understanding how students actually experience lost-and-found situations on campus.

Talking to Real People

Each team member conducted three in-depth interviews with students, faculty, and staff, totaling over 30 conversations. We weren’t just asking what people wanted in an app — we were understanding the emotions, frustrations, and decision-making processes that happen when you lose or find something valuable.

One story stuck with us: a junior found someone’s wallet but didn’t know where to take it. She kept it for three weeks, checking Facebook groups daily, feeling terrible about the situation. Eventually she turned it into campus police, but never learned if the owner got it back.

This captured our core insight: good intentions were being undermined by broken systems.

The Numbers That Guided Our Design

Our follow-up survey revealed critical patterns that shaped every feature we built:

• 55.6% of users preferred direct contact with item owners rather than going through intermediaries
• Security concerns dominated — people worried about false claims and theft
• High-value items (over $200) created entirely different user behaviors and trust requirements

Learning from What’s Already Out There

We analyzed everything from UC Davis’s official Lost & Found website to Facebook groups, the Ring Neighbors app, and enterprise solutions like Pixit. Each had pieces of the puzzle, but none solved the fundamental problems of trust, organization, and community connection that our research revealed.

We even studied Japan’s famous lost-and-found system, often cited as the global gold standard. While impressive, we realized its success came from cultural norms around civic duty that we couldn’t simply copy — we needed technological solutions to build the trust that Japanese society creates culturally.

The Solution: Five Core Features That Actually Work

PinPoint addresses each major pain point we discovered through targeted features designed around real user behavior.

1. Smart Reporting System

Users pin the exact location where they lost items on an interactive campus map, add timing details, categorize their item, and upload up to three photos. To prevent theft, users must provide sufficient detail about an item category before they can view similar found items — no more browsing for expensive electronics without proving you actually lost something.

2. Intuitive Listing System

Found items get logged the same way: map pinning, timing, categorization, and photos. This creates a comprehensive, searchable database of items waiting to be claimed.

3. Intelligent Dashboard

The central hub combines keyword search, map-based browsing, and smart filtering. Users can quickly search for their specific items or browse what’s available, with location filters that make sense for campus geography.

4. Automated Matching

Our algorithm analyzes temporal, spatial, and categorical data to automatically suggest potential matches. Lost your laptop near Wellman Hall on Tuesday? You’ll immediately see any laptops found in that area around that time, ranked by likelihood of being yours.

5. Profile Management

Users can track their reports, view their listing history, and contact our team directly. The system maintains accountability while protecting privacy until verified matches occur.

Building It: Technical Decisions That Matter

The Tech Stack

We chose technologies that prioritize user experience over technical novelty:

Frontend: React and Next.js provide fast, responsive interfaces with server-side rendering for quick load times — crucial when people are anxiously searching for lost items.

Database: Supabase with PostgreSQL offers reliable data storage with modern APIs, perfect for complex matching queries while maintaining performance.

Mapping: Leaflet integration creates intuitive location pinning that works smoothly on campus WiFi and mobile devices.

Authentication: Google OAuth ensures only UC Davis community members can access the platform, creating inherent trust while maintaining privacy.

The Smart Matching Algorithm

Our most innovative feature analyzes multiple factors to connect lost and found items:

• Time correlation: Items lost and found within reasonable windows get higher match scores
• Location clustering: Geographic proximity matters, but we account for campus foot traffic patterns
• Detailed categorization: Beyond basic item types, we match colors, sizes, brands, and distinctive features
• Learning system: Successful matches improve future recommendations

Design Evolution: From Purple Chaos to Trusted Platform

Fall 2024: Finding the Right Mental Model

Our early designs explored everything from bottom-sliding panels to complex category hierarchies. User testing revealed that people think in simple terms: “I lost something” or “I found something.” This insight restructured our entire interface around these two primary user journeys.

Winter 2025: Building Visual Trust

We developed a comprehensive design system, moving away from our initial bold purple palette that users found “too aggressive for people already stressed about lost items.” The new system balanced trust-building blues with energetic accents, creating an environment that felt both reliable and approachable.

Spring 2025: The Final Polish

Based on advisor feedback, we refined our emotional design. The interface evolved from feeling like a database to feeling like a community platform. Softer transitions, welcoming copy, and reassuring interaction feedback transformed PinPoint into something students actually enjoy using.

Challenges That Made Us Stronger

The Firebase Migration

Midway through development, we discovered that our initial backend choice created integration friction with Google services. Migrating to Firebase required rewriting significant code but ultimately provided seamless authentication and cloud storage integration. The experience taught us to evaluate technology choices for entire product roadmaps, not just immediate features.

Cross-Functional Communication

Early on, designers and developers worked in parallel tracks that occasionally diverged. Our breakthrough came through weekly collaborative sessions where technical constraints and design goals informed each other in real-time. Instead of designers creating mockups and “throwing them over the wall,” we began collaborative problem-solving that produced better solutions than either discipline could achieve alone.

Scope Management

Our initial wishlist included in-app messaging, social networks, and AI-powered features. Learning to distinguish between user needs and technical possibilities kept us focused on core functionality that actually serves our community.

Early Impact and User Response

Since launching, Google Analytics shows average session durations exceeding four minutes — suggesting genuine engagement rather than quick searches. Geographic usage patterns correlate with campus foot traffic, validating our location-based approach.

More importantly, qualitative feedback indicates we’re achieving our community-building goals. Students report feeling more connected to campus life through helping others recover lost items. One graduate student wrote: “I never realized how much stress I carried about losing things on campus until I had PinPoint. Just knowing there’s a system that actually works makes me feel more at home here.”

What’s Next: Growing the Platform

Long-Term Vision

• Bounty systems allowing users to offer rewards for particularly valuable items
• Multi-campus expansion to other UC schools and universities nationwide
• Campus integration partnering with security, facilities, and student services for seamless workflows

Beyond Lost and Found: Building Community Through Code

PinPoint represents more than a technical solution — it demonstrates how thoughtful technology can strengthen community connections. Every design decision, from our mapping interface to our matching algorithms, serves the goal of helping people help each other.

Our year-long journey taught us that the best campus technology emerges from genuine user research, collaborative development, and focus on community needs over technical novelty. Students face countless challenges that technology could address, but only when designed with deep empathy and careful attention to how people actually live their lives.

Ready to Find What You’ve Lost?

PinPoint is live and ready to help UC Davis students reconnect with their lost items and each other. Whether you’re searching for missing AirPods or hoping to return someone’s forgotten laptop, you’re joining a community that looks out for one another.

Visit https://pinpoint-revamped.vercel.app to get started, follow our journey on Instagram @pin.point.it, or reach out at pinpoint.davis@gmail.com.