Rainbow Reclamation

UH Mānoa Digital Hub for Reporting and Recovering Lost Items

Overview

Rainbow Reclamation is a web application that aims to serve as a centralized, digital lost and found system for the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa community and beyond other campuses. The platform addresses a common campus issue of lost personal items like accessories, clothing, and electronics that are often scattered around campus or have never been properly reported missing.

The application allows students, faculty, and staff members in the University of Hawai’i system to report lost or found items, browse listings, and follow clear recovery instructions without unnecessary in-person visits or check-ins. By combining item reporting, dashboards, and a bounty board, Rainbow Relcamation allows a streamlined recovery process and improves transparency across the many different University of Hawai’i campus communities.

Contributions

My contributions in this group project primarily focus on user experience, layout consistency, and key functional pages that made the web application feel cohesive and usable.

I created various mockup pages for the landing page, user dashboard, and admin dashboard to help establish a consistent visual structure and navigation flow for the application. These pages allow users and admins to quickly understand the purpose of the platform and how to interact with these core features and functions.

Page Mockups

Landing Page

User Dashboard

Admin Dashboard

Additionally, I was responsible for making the global styling of the application, which helped unify typography, spacing, colors, and layout across all pages. This helps reduce visual segmentation caused by parallel development and presents the app as a polished product.

Submission Instructions Page

Claim (Recovery) Instructions Page

Also, I worked on creating the bounty board, which allows users to associate a reward for the lost item. This feature aims to increase engagement and incentivize users to help retrieve lost items, which makes the platform a more practical and impactful way to help find lost items.

Bounty Board

What I Learned

After working on this project, I have come to understand the importance of early design alignment and structure in team-based software development projects. Establishing shared layouts and styling conventions early reduced integration friction and prevented the interface from being inconsistent.

Additionally, I learned that front-end development is closely tied to usability and trust. Getting to understand that pages that guide users through real-world actions like submitting or reclaiming lost items must be clear, direct, predictable, and well-structured to feel reliable in the web application.

From a collaboration perspective, the team project emphasized ideas of accountability and communication within the team. Getting to coordinate design decisions alongside active feature development has helped me understand that the user interface supported actual functionality rather than existing only as isolated mockups.