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Problem Statement
A co-living space offering tech-enabled, fully-furnished residences for students and working professionals uses a mobile app for its' residents to use, was facing extremely low user engagement.
While the brand aimed to digitize key touchpoints in the resident journey, the app failed to support this vision—leading users to rely on offline methods and exposing major gaps in experience and feature accessibility.
DESIGN PROCESS
Design process we undertook
We followed a structured 4D design process — Discover, Define, Design, and Deliver — to create a user-centric solution that aligned with both resident needs and business goals.
Discovery
Define
Conceptualisation
Design
Deliver
DISCOVERY
Stakeholder Interviews
We as a team, conducted a discovery workshop with the clients to understand the current issues they were facing.
Lacking a good support system for the residents to resolve everyday issues to monthly maintenance and payments
Low Adoption and Engagement rates on the app. Users were only opening the app 2-3 times a week.
And engagement on the app for amenities were really low.
Low discoverability for of a lot of the app’s functionalities features and was thus affecting the revenue of individual co-living spaces
Increase in work hours for residence managers since people reach out to them directly
Conducting user research
We as a team of designers conducted user interviews with 20 different residents who currently live in the co-living space, to get an idea of what are the issues they face, and what their usual day looks like. We also spoke to a few residence managers.
Key insights from the user research
So overall, we understood that communication and support for existing touch points were complex:
- Support/help section is not easily visible or accessible on the app
- Users often skip the app and contact the residence manager directly
- Reliance on offline methods indicates low trust in the app’s functionality
- Long turnaround time once a support ticket is raised
- No transparency on expected response/resolution timelines
Existing User Journey
We mapped the end-to-end user journeys of a resident raising an everyday issue on the app to uncover pain points, opportunities, and moments that matter across the resident experience.
We also created journeys for new residents, and for different important resident activities: Collecting Food, Setting Food Preference, Raising support for an issue and so on.
DEFINE
Persona Mapping
Designed with a focus on the primary user base — students and working professionals aged 20–30 — to ensure relevance, ease, and everyday usability.
How Might We?
We translated insights from the user journey into focused HMW questions that guided our ideation, helping us design meaningful solutions across support, payments, and food preferences.
How might we make the support feature more visible and intuitive to access?
How might we anticipate common support needs and prompt users before they reach out?
How might we build user trust by providing real-time updates and transparency during issue resolution?
How might we help users make all decisions and touchpoints digitally instead of human support
How might we reduce dependency on the residence manager for support-related issues?
How might we make setting or updating food preferences more seamless and personalized
Setting a design direction for the entire experience
We set a core direction going forward to ensure we streamlined design decisions from an experience perspective
Intuitve
Every interaction must be intuitive, and every information that is presented should be clear, simple & concise.
Assistive
The experience we design must enable user to easily reach out whenever there is an issue and get resolution.
Simplified
The experience we create should offer flexibility, supporting and guiding the user where they can easily find what they are looking for.
Pre-emptive
The design should preempt the needs of the user by showing information/actions that are relevant to them.
We built the Information Architecture
We mapped out the app’s structure to make it super easy for residents to find what they need and get things done without the hassle.
And sketched out a few design solutions
We started with quick paper sketches to explore ideas, layout possibilities, and user flows before jumping into high-fidelity designs.
DESIGNING
Established a visual style for the mobile app
Given that a large portion of its user base is less than 30, we aimed for the app's visual design to be fresh and distinctive, embodying a modern and innovative experience, in line with the brand's focus on tech independence.
We incorporated glass morphism in the icons and cards across the mobile application, enhancing its dynamic quality.
Key improvements across the app
We focused on existing user pain points and redesigned key features to be more intuitive, accessible, and efficient—making everyday interactions smoother, efficient and more delightful.
Dynamic Dashboard Cards
Since users were missing key information and announcements pertaining to their stays, we came up with a solution to ensure that users would always stay up to date and be able to communicate/take action wherever necessary.
We utilised the real estate in the Homepage, as a digital notice board and used large cards, that would grab the user's attention.
These cards would also dynamically rearrange according to the current time of day, thereby using predictive tech and ML, it would adapt to what the user needs to see at the moment.
Additionally, distinct colors have been employed for each service, facilitating easy recognition of the cards for each category of notice. Eg: Yellow for Food, Orange for cleaning, Purple for Wifi and so on.
Predictive Food Preference Setting
One of the major cards that we had introduced was to help the users select their meal preferences for the entire week using AI
This, enabled with notifications to remind users to select was a transformation to the earlier process, where the resident would have to inform the captain via WhatsApp
We also introduced a ‘Pre-Selected’ menu option (Default option), based on their profile data on what cuisines they usually prefer.
New Digital Food Collection Method
Introduced a ‘Collect Lunch’ Card, with a timer to represent when they should collect the food.
And on clicking the card, we showcase the meal of the day, with a Swipe CTA, that activates their meal collection for a limited time, within which they can collect their meal
One of the use cases that came up in initial Usability Testing (Done by client), was that residents could misuse the static food confirmation screen.
We decided to make the screen dynamic by incorporating moving shapes in the background as well as adding the current date on the screen
CONCLUSION
Impact
Redesign of the application was met mostly with positive feedback. We also recieved stakeholder feedback, that adoption and engagement rates have gone up.
Users have responded well to the app's features and the simplistic navigation
DESIGN TEAM
Pradhiksha
Madhumitha
Rajabutheen
Ruthiksha
Doris Santhus
Naseer Ahmed
Arun Mathew
Ashwin
ILLUSTRATION TEAM
Varsha Thangaraj
Jithin Prasad
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