Steli — Find Your Spot. Own Your Ranking. #
By Daniel’s Team: Aayush Kapoor, Alexander Hutchinson, Sophie Wang, Daniel Zhu, Alyssa Guo, Benjamin Chung
The study spot app built by students, for students.
You Know This Feeling #
It’s Week 11. Midterms are overlapping with assignments, your caffeine tolerance is through the roof, and you desperately need a good place to sit down and grind. You head to DC Library, obviously, and walk in to find every single seat taken, a faint smell of stale coffee and desperation (and sweat) in the air, and someone’s abandoned Tupperware sitting on the only open table. You check SLC. Same story. You wander around for 40 minutes, backpack digging into your shoulders, and eventually give up and go home, where you proceed to do absolutely nothing productive.
Sound familiar?
Now imagine you had an app that already knew exactly where your friend Emma, who is quite performative, studied last Tuesday. An app that told you the QNC 3rd floor study lounge has solid outlets, decent vibes, and barely anyone in it right now. An app that helped you build your own personal, ranked list of every study spot you’ve ever loved, so you never have to wander aimlessly again.
That’s Steli.
What Even Is Steli? #
Steli is a social study spot ranking app built specifically for university students. Think of it as the love child of Instagram and Beli, but for campus study spots.
If you’ve used Beli before, you know how addictive pairwise ranking is. Instead of slapping a generic 4/5 stars on a restaurant and calling it a day, Beli asks you: “Which did you like more — this one or that one?” Those head-to-head comparisons build a ranking that actually means something. Steli brings that same satisfying system to your study life.
And like Instagram, Steli is social. You can follow your friends, see where they’ve been studying, browse their ranked lists, and discover hidden gems you never would’ve found on your own.
How It Works #
1. Add a Spot #
Visit a new study location? Add it to Steli. Drop in a photo, write a note (“great natural light, outlets near every seat, gets loud after 2pm”), and you’re done.
2. Rank It #
Steli asks you one simple question at a time:
“Which do you prefer — Dana Porter Library or the E7 Atrium?”
You answer. It asks again. In a few taps, Steli figures out exactly where your new spot lands in your personal ranking, no fussing with stars or sliders. Your spots get a clean numerical score like 7.2/10, generated from your own real preferences.
3. Explore Your Friends’ Lists #
Follow your friends and see their ranked spots on your home feed. If your friend Jordan, who always finds the coziest corners, just ranked the Earth Sciences Museum as his #1, maybe it’s worth checking out. Steli turns word-of-mouth into something you can actually browse.
Why Steli Is Different #
| Feature | Google Maps / Reddit | Steli |
|---|---|---|
| Ratings that mean something | Generic star ratings from strangers | Pairwise rankings from you and your friends |
| Student-specific info | Reviews from 2015 by someone’s parent | Notes on outlets, vibes, noise levels |
| Social discovery | Scattered Reddit threads | A feed of your actual friends’ favourites |
| Campus focus | Built for the whole world | Built for your campus life |
What It Looks Like #
Steli is clean, fast, and designed for on-the-go use between classes. The whole experience follows a three-tap rule, you can log a new study spot in under three interactions from the home screen. No bloat, no friction.
Key screens include:
- Home Feed — your friends’ recent rankings, sorted by recency
- Discover — browse all study spots added by students across campus
- Rank — the pairwise comparison screen, quick and satisfying
- Profile — your personal ranked list, your story
Built With Care #
Steli was designed with real human values in mind, not just features. The team thought hard about privacy (no live location sharing, no metadata stored in photos), accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA compliant), and simplicity (do a few things really well, rather than everything poorly).
Safety-conscious decisions, like opting out of a real-time map and keeping interactions asynchronous, were made deliberately to protect users, not just to cut corners.
Why You Should Vote for Steli #
Because you have, at some point in your university career, wasted 30 minutes looking for a place to sit down and study. Because your friend group has collectively spent hours texting “where are you studying?” in the group chat. Because you’ve scrolled Reddit threads from 3 years ago trying to find a quiet corner of campus you haven’t tried yet.
Steli is the app that should’ve existed when you started university. It’s practical, it’s social, it’s genuinely fun to use, and it was built by students in this very course who felt exactly the same frustrations you have.
Give it your vote. Help us get it into the hands of every student on campus.
Built by Daniel’s Team for ECE452/CS446 — University of Waterloo, Winter 2026.