Rather than throw out everything recognizable, I kept what carried real equity: the human, day-in-the-life imagery of students and host families, and the name everyone already used. Students, hosts, partners, and the internal team all said "SRS," never "StudentRoomStay," so the shorthand became the official mark.

The old logo, three overlapping houses in red and blue with an icon layered on the front, was doing too much. I replaced it with a single house silhouette carrying an upward arrow: growth, transformation, the idea that you arrive at the house and grow. Set in Inter to give the brand a modern, credible voice where the old semi-rounded typeface read like it was made in a day, and anchored in blue for its quiet association with trust.

The site had sprawled into pages that weren't earning their place, styled in half a dozen competing directions. I consolidated the sprawl, unified everything into one minimal but warm system, and put the most work into the homepage, which had to do the hardest job on the site: explain a brand-new category (a vetted homestay marketplace), surface every offer, and make the differentiators, vetted hosts and real selection, impossible to miss without adding clutter. Trust signals like CSIET certification sat front and center, and even the stock imagery was curated obsessively until every photo felt like the real families the brand served. Over two years, weekly traffic grew from under 1,000 visitors to over 2,000.

For most of its history, SRS ran placements and host payouts through AMP, an internal tool where everything was tracked and paid manually. The new platform turned that into the first true homestay marketplace: students and families could browse vetted hosts, chat, book, and pay entirely on their own, with host payouts automated. I owned the user experience, translating the founders' vision into flows that made sense, pushing back on complexity at every step, and working alongside the developers on what could actually ship.

Because the marketplace runs on families trusting strangers with their kids, credibility was the primary design goal, and in practice credibility meant honesty and calm. The booking flow shows what that looked like. Families could pay just the first month up front and continue monthly instead of covering the full stay at once, with the billing terms stated plainly and no interest. Payment fees were disclosed before choosing, not buried at checkout: credit card with its processing fee named, or bank account with none. And every charge stayed visible on the way to paying, chosen services like meals and school transportation listed by name, with a full price breakdown one click away. No fake urgency, no pushy popups, nothing flashy. Just a calm, legible flow a parent could move through without ever second-guessing the company behind it.

Social was rebuilt from scattered and inconsistent to clean, modern, and enthusiastic. Because students found SRS through agents rather than directly, the feed's job wasn't conversion, it was legitimacy: making the company look as real and credible at a glance as it actually was, for every parent, host, and partner who checked before committing.