Kinship
Replacing 300 WhatsApp messages a week with one app a community actually trusts.
Objective — give admins and residents a single source of truth, so coordination runs itself instead of running through a person.
The whole project, in four beats.
The short version before the story — situation, task, action, result.
A whole community, run by hand across four disconnected tools.
A society of 100–300 flats coordinated announcements, resident records, event sign-ups, and approvals across WhatsApp, paper registers, Google Forms, and Excel — with no shared source of truth between admins and residents.
What was happening before this existed.
Coordination lived entirely across disconnected tools — chat threads, spreadsheets, and paper — with no shared source of truth between admins and residents.
The manual process didn't just slow things down — it created unpaid, invisible labor for admins and constant uncertainty for residents who had no way to confirm their own status without asking a person.
Three people feel it, in three different ways.
Everything ran by hand — so I replaced the person with a system.
No shared source of truth, and no way to self-serve.
Admins lost hours every week to repetitive approvals and record-keeping. Residents couldn't answer "am I on the list?" without messaging a person and waiting. Coordinators were interrupted mid-event, unable to enjoy the event they ran.
One structured, two-sided app.
- Self-service registration — login by block, flat & PIN, no accounts.
- Availability shown as a badge before entry, not after submit.
- One-tap admin approvals, one screen per flat.
- On-device QR check-in — no email, no PDF, no third party.
- Status residents can see themselves, anytime.
Who this was built for, and where.
- Residents of apartment societies — no defined age limit, any community context.
- Society administrators — typically unpaid volunteers managing the operation.
- Event coordinators running activities on the ground.
Any residential community or housing society, accessed primarily on smartphones (iOS and Android), in the moments of everyday community life — moving in, checking event details, or showing up to an event.
From mess to shipped app, in five moves.
What we did, and what each told us.
A mix of discovery, synthesis, and evaluative methods — each aimed at a different question, each with outcomes that shaped the build.
- The recurring pain wasn't speed — it was that no one could see their own status without asking a person.
- Coordinators were interrupted mid-event, unable to enjoy the event they were running.
- Closure mattered more than features — people wanted proof something had actually happened.
- No visibility into availability — residents couldn't tell if spots were open before registering.
- No way to separate pre-approved flats from ones needing manual review.
- Repeated data entry — group registrations re-typed every member, every time.
- No confirmation after registering — nothing to point back to.
- Details buried in WhatsApp chat history.
- Move spot availability before entry, not after submit.
- Give every registration a durable, visible confirmation (the QR ticket).
- Collapse admin approvals to one screen, one tap per flat.
- Task-completion rate on the core flows — register, approve, check-in.
- Time saved per admin, per event.
- Direct resident and admin quotes to evidence the qualitative impact.
What people actually did — and the shift the product makes.
Residents would repeatedly approach event organizers in person to ask when their slot was or whether they were confirmed — interrupting the organizer's ability to actually run the event.
Residents had to physically find and sit with organizers to get an answer, which meant organizers often couldn't participate in or enjoy the events they were running.
Status — registered, confirmed, checked in — becomes something a resident checks on their own screen, not something they ask another person for. That single change is what gives coordinators their event back.
The real problem wasn't that things were slow. It was that no one could see their own status without asking another human.
How it actually works — and what got simplified.
Register flat → get approved → discover events → register → attend with a QR ticket.
Configure the society → approve residents → create and schedule events → run them live, scanning tickets.
- Login by block + flat + PIN — no account creation.
- Registration cut to two steps, family members pre-filled.
- Availability shown as a badge before entry, not a post-submit error.
- QR tickets generated on-device — no email, no PDF, no third party.
- Admin approvals collapsed to one screen, one tap per flat.
Replace the human — but hand back the certainty.
The interface had to create confidence and closure: every action — registering, approving, checking in — ends in an immediate, visible confirmation, so no one has to wonder whether something actually happened. That principle is why status became something a resident checks on their own screen, not something they ask a person for.
See the app in action.
Open the interactive walkthrough of the resident and admin experience — registration, approvals, and QR check-in — in a new tab.
What changes, from the old way to the new.
What I'd carry forward.
Removing a human from a workflow only builds trust if the system replaces them with something equally reassuring — a badge, a confirmation, a status people can check themselves.
Formal usability testing with a defined sample size, to move the impact metrics from "to be validated" to measured.
Coordination that once needed a message now happens on its own.