It was a design challenge and it took me 4 days to finish, including the documentation of this case study.

Problem Statement

Today, societies & apartments do not have a great system to share concerns/complaints and track the progress of these issues. Design a system to enable residents to do this easily. Explain the scoping and constraints you chose.

Understanding the goal (Why)

I believe this product is important for two reasons-

1)Competitive Real Estate market: With the rise in affordable and budget-friendly housing options, providing the best facilities to the residents has become a bare minimum.

Cooperative societies and apartment complexes are now growing larger, and managing these societies is becoming a time-consuming and mammoth task. Complaint/issue management is one of the prime services for any management formed for any purpose and forms one of the major pillars of any good society.

Therefore, for any complex, a proper complaint management system is the boon of the hour, creating a vast market for this concept. A proper system will work in the long run to cater to personal and community complaints with great ease, especially when hundreds of society options are available out there.

2)Comparatively new concept with less competition: At present, fewer competitors exist in the market to date, as the concept is relatively new. Since such a product specially dedicated to Housing Complaint/issue management doesn’t exist yet, creating a relevant solution we could have the advantage of being the first player. This increases the app's chances of outshining the others,starting a business opportunity, and eventually generating satisfactory revenue.

Defining the audience

Based on the problem statement, the only high-level audience we have here is the Resident.

Further, we can divide this audience into some main groups which are impacted in different ways, and the relevant solution might help them serve better-

• Millennials consist of working professionals. It becomes a real hassle for them to take time from their busy schedule for raising these complaints and track them, especially if they live alone.
• Older Generation or Baby Boomers- For Senior citizens with various health concerns, contacting the right person and getting their complaints registered is challenging. Digital products sometimes leave them under-served because they have low tech-savviness, and with a relevant solution, they can be served better.
• Foreign Nationals find it difficult to communicate properly and contact the right officials for their complaints.
• Disabled people- I’m not sure how easily people with motor conditions get their complaints registered at present.

Understanding the existing system and the problem associated with it-

To understand the working of the current system, I conducted Telephonic User Interviews and also went through the reviews of similar apps such as Neighbium, Apna Complex, SnB, ADDA, etc. ( These apps require your society to be registered in them. Therefore, it got challenging to understand the working and the exact features they were holding. Hence, this analysis may not be fully comprehensive, and I may have missed out on some features.) to know how good is their solutionand what they were missing out on.

User Interviews were conducted with 4 people ranging from 26 to 61 years old, varying from those living in small apartments to the large luxurious complexes, with the aim to understand their process of getting a complaint registered.

I got the following insights from the User Interview-

I found that currently, there are five most common ways in which residents reached out with their complaints-

1) Keeping a Complaint Register/ official hardcopy format: This is an obsolete pen and paper method. Every time residents face an issue; they can record it down in the official register.

Problems Faced-

• No quick actions are taken because complaints are collectively attended after 1–2 days.
• Hardcopies give in the chance of being accidentally misplaced or complaints being pushed down unconsciously, failing in meeting timely resolution.

2) Contacting guards or management using the traditional wired intercom to convey your complaint.

• Here complaints are mostly not documented for the proper redressal process, so sometimes they are pushed back due to the instant inconvenience of the situation.
• Sometimes they are forgotten, so you need to give multiple reminders, which annoys both committee members and residents.

3) Contacting the vendors directly.

• Unavailability, safety, and cost are the main concerns of the residents here.

4) Visiting the office to submit the complaint application.

• Offices are open only for limited hrs.
• Residents cannot register complaints on holidays.
• Inconvenience due to physical visit to the society office.

5) Raising the concern over WhatsApp and Facebook groups.

• The bigger the societies, the more the number of WhatsApp groups. This system makes it difficult to track the official WhatsApp group.
• The continuous pinging of irrelevant forwards and messages is distracting, resulting in management missing important complaints.

Ideation and Paper Prototyping

Now that I had a better understanding of who I was designing for and their context, I felt equipped with my background research. I then made a few assumptions that helped me to build a relevant product-

1. This complaint management app is owned by the society “NRI Complex.”
2. Residents/Members of the society get registered and are given unique login credentials and member ID cards at the time of occupancy of the residence.
3. Members can either login using their credentials or can scan their card to get started with the app.
4. There is a separate app for the management to manage and assign staff to all the complaints raised and one for the attending staff to track their complaints and updatereal-time status.

Here are some user stories I will focus on based on the context and the problems we explored above:

1. As a resident, I want to resolve my complaints through society so that it is cost-effective and doesn’t compromise my safety.
2. As a resident, I want to fix my complaints as soon as possible so that if it’s urgent, it doesn’t worsen and affect my everyday work.
3. As a resident, I want to quickly know the status to save my time from the frequent calls and reminders.
4. As a resident, I want to easily express my discontent over the resolution to assure quality work in the future.

Paper Sketches

For paper wireframes, I sketched out all the possible layouts and finally came out with the one that worked the best. This allowed me to prototype solutions for the main screens before committing to high-fidelity designs.