App Development
Improving interactions between homeowners
In the last few years, Mexican families have been increasing their demand to live in homeowners associations. When people live in this environment, they get new responsibilities like paying monthly fees, services fees (pool maintenance, gardening service, security, etc), and active participation in decision-making.
Living in these types of residential communities is in a way complex; that's because the homeowners must share common areas and responsibilities, and this could lead to different problems like:
At the beginning of the project, we noticed that the range of homeowners' ages was too wide, so to design a platform that can be used by everyone took us to do usability tests to validate the prototypes of the product.
To design a tool that was a replacement for excel became difficult because managers were comfortable using it, but we discovered some insight that we took advantage of.
To create the project, so choose the following stack:
One of the first activities we did was to get an approach with the residential communities, for that we assisted to some meetings to hear about their problems, interest topics, and agreements. This helps us understand the way homeowners live and the interactions they have. We discovered that for each community we visited, they were facing the same problems and disagreements
People didn't know how their money had been handled and they had the feeling that it was not spent in the correct way, and in some critical cases, they believed that managers who controlled the payments were stealing the community's money.
To define what could be our first app version, we needed to identify how we could give the highest value to the user, so we took the major paint point that all communities have in common: Poor clarity on community financial accounts.
We design and build an app that can be used by managers and every single homeowner in the community to help them with their daily activities.
This module is the core value of the product, here every member can see the community's expenses and payments and also make their own maintenance payments.
The fact that making a reservation to use a common area like the swimming pool could be a reason to result in a conflict, so we developed a module where every member can look at what are the days available to them and make the reservations by themselves.
When a decision must be made, regularly, the community gets together in a meeting to discuss a topic and at the end, they make a poll to decide. This is, in most cases a hard and stressful situation also with the pandemic this gets more difficult.
That's why it was created inside the social feed on the app: a voting card, how does this work? The manager can create a poll and every member gets notified and starts voting in real-time for one of the options the manager gives them, and after the closure poll date, the winner option is shown.
