Process

For the final project, we had all of the freedom to choose a topic. Well, something feasible to accomplish individually within 2 weeks + the weekend.

In this case study I am showing the research that led me to the final version of MVP design of FlashDoor app. For this, I constructed the survey, talked to real users, next I analyzed and synthesized all information to come up with solution for identified problems. Later, I organized information architecture with help of open card sorting and did iteration of user testing-prototyping several times.

I had an idea of creating a tool that might help neighbours interact with each other. I personally faced the problem of borrowing tools when there was the renovation in my apartment and I thought that it might be something that all people face. To figure that out I launched a survey with help of lean survey canvas to understand the relevance of the problem.

Surprisingly, people don’t care about their neighbours and they don’t have any problems with contacting them🤔

But! More than a half of respondents don’t have communication tool, whereas the rest use chats to keep in touch between neighbours and condo management. Unfortunately, for the majority, the existing interaction tool is non-functional territory of complaints.

Therefrom, I changed my focus to condominium — residents communication and continued research with some interviews.

An important thing to note is that the majority of respondents were from Kazakhstan, so I decided to settle on this country. Another reason for doing so, while comparing 2 major respondent groups I figured out that Spanish people are not facing same problems as Kazakhstani citizens, meaning that building types, regulations and rules might vary from country to country.

I asked 5 residents and 1 condominium manager about their experience in communicating between each other. Obviously, it’s much more complicated for manager to deal with all residents (on average ~100 apartments), nevertheless there are matching pain points for both sides:

Notification board is one of the main sources of information — news happening in a building, including invitations to meetings, votings, policies and rules, updates, contact information sometimes mixed with ads.

Here what residents say:

“While voting, people hang paper on walls or go around all apartments”

“Condo didn’t notify us on time about repair works and water supply, they did it after the date. I think, they just forgot to do it on time, so we can’t complain”

“Once, we were looking for rooftop key to install antenna, search took a lot of time, apparently manager gave it to someone and he didn’t remember who was it”

Major pain point for condominium manager turned out to be keeping track of residents, noncompliance with rules:

“It’s hard to get updates from new or old residents, sometimes they, move away leaving debt behind them”

What this means is that simple tasks that can be done in two ticks take people a lot of time and effort, and I came up with the problem statement that describes two way interaction:

Both resident and manager are represented as following user personas with their goals and frustrations:

Taking into account local competition, main competitors for this app are well known chats — WhatsApp, FB. Despite being one of the quickest and responsive way of interaction, it’s worth considering that they lose in following:

In order to visualise current process of communication I considered task analysis by answering questions below to identify which features to include in MVP:

The app is for two user categories: condominium and residents. I considered feature prioritization for both user categories. With help of MoSCoW technique I decided to focus on following for MVP design: activity board, contact with manager/resident, information point, reporting on issue/adding an announcement.

Next stop is information architecture, which was quite tough task to do if not card sorting technique. For open card sorting I asked 4 user to cluster features:

After building paper prototype with the information architecture based on most matching results of card sorting, I asked 5 users to accomplish tasks. Here major problems discovered during tests and changes I did after:

After all usability testings, major changes in my system were mostly about the information architecture and iconography. Instead of 4 tabs I have 5 tabs for both categories:
Resident: News-board, Chats, Reports, Info and Profile
Manager: News-board, Chats, Reports, Residents and Profile

Each type of prototype was tested several times before coming to final version:

Note: after 1st splash screen there is resident’s interface, after 2nd splash screen — manager’s interface.

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