An app that helps residents of building towers to report their issues to the management company and track the resolutions.
*This is a design exercise I made and it took about a week to deal with the challenges it holds. As a person who lives in a residential tower, I was immediately drawn to this exercise and decided to focus on the community that lives in those towers.
Towers with 10 floors, 15 and even more are becoming common in residential neighborhoods in the central cities of Israel.
Those towers require constant care by a management company due to the complex systems and the large number of tenants. Of course, life there often holds challenges for the potential users which are the tenants, the representative committee and the management company. For this exercise I focused specifically on the tenants.
I created a short questionnaire that was sent to the residents of my neighborhood via Whatsapp and a closed Facebook group of the community. After that, I chose a few neighbors and friends to have a quick interview and dig a little deeper.
The residents of this community are very involved and caring about the order and cleanliness of their surroundings. I discovered a few common pains during my research, that surfaced from talking to these community representatives.
Based on the interviews, few pains were common:
Pain #1: Contacting the management team is complicated given their busy lifestyle. They barely have time to email, SMS or call the management company at the time they discover an issue.
Pain #2: The residents’ representative committee are dependent of the workers the management company hire and when contacted by the residents they often can’t offer solution.
Pain #3: The residents rarely get notified about the resolution of the issues they reported and need to discover about it by themselves.
Daniella represents the residents of this community.
A typical User Story she might come across:
”As a caring neighbor, I want the oil stain to be cleaned, so that nobody will step in it and might slip.
I experimented with a few ideas and moved on with an app where the caring residents can report the issues they come across and get notified about the status of the resolution.
The solutions I offer for the pains that surfaced from the discovery could help the residents easily report during their busy schedule by:
- Sort issues to categories and save them steps in the process
- Let them record instead of type in order to save time
- Send them notifications to keep them updated on the resolution progress of the issue they reported
Measure Success:
By seeing a climbing percentage of user engagement and retention over a certain period of time, we can conclude that the app serves as a better solution to the ones the residents currently have.
Lessons learned:
-A quick usability test taught me that the issues categories on the home screen aren’t as comprehensible as I predicted and users not always know which category the issue they want to report belongs to. Therefore, I added the “Not sure” button for this case.
- Being a part of a certain community you want to test might seem like a quick solution at first but reality proves different.