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.
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.
Before the project
Coordination lived entirely across disconnected tools — chat threads, spreadsheets, and paper — with no shared source of truth between admins and residents.
Why it mattered
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.
The admin
An unpaid volunteer absorbing hours of repetitive approvals and record-keeping that never ends.
The resident
No way to confirm their own status — every question means finding and messaging a person.
The coordinator
Interrupted mid-event by people asking when their slot is, unable to enjoy the event they run.
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.
The whole project, in four moves.
A 100–300 flat apartment society ran everything by hand — announcements, records, event sign-ups, and approvals split across WhatsApp, paper registers, Google Forms, and Excel, with no shared source of truth.
Give residents, admins, and coordinators a way to know their own status — registered, approved, checked in — without messaging a person and waiting for a reply.
Reviewed the manual process, interviewed the people running it, and mapped both journeys. Designed and built a two-sided app solo — self-service registration, status shown before entry, one-tap approvals, on-device QR check-in — and shipped it to iOS and Android.
Running a 200-flat society now feels like running 20 — one shared source of truth, zero status interruptions by design. Hard numbers (task completion, time saved) are being validated in usability testing now.
Who this was built for, and where.
Target users
- 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.
Environment
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.
Review the current mess
Pulled the history of events run by hand, logged every point the process broke, and separated real problems from assumed ones.
Interview the people running it
Sat with the co-hosts who had actually run events and captured their friction in their own words — surfacing the status-and-trust insight.
Map the journeys
Drew the resident and admin paths end-to-end, marking hesitation, re-entry, and drop-off, then prioritised what to fix first.
Design the two sides
Low-fidelity wireframes, a reusable design system, and the key calls: flat + PIN login, availability before entry, on-device QR.
Build and ship
Developed the full-stack app solo, shipped to iOS and Android, and moved into the current testing phase.
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.
1 · User interviews
Qualitative · discoveryWhat we did
Sat with the volunteers who had run events across WhatsApp, Forms, and Excel and walked each of them through a real event end-to-end — asking them to mark every moment that cost time or created confusion, captured in their own language rather than led.
Outcomes
- 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.
2 · Retrospective review
Discovery · auditWhat we did
Reviewed the actual record of events coordinated manually, tracing exactly where WhatsApp, Google Forms, and Excel broke down in practice — and deliberately separating the problems that were real from the ones that were merely assumed.
Outcomes — the five failure points
- 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.
3 · Journey mapping
SynthesisWhat we did
Drew both the resident and admin paths end-to-end and marked every point where people hesitated, re-entered data, or dropped off — then prioritised which moments were worth fixing first.
Outcomes — design moves it pointed to
- 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.
4 · Usability testing
Evaluative · in progressWhat we did
Task-based sessions comparing the old manual coordination flow against the app, timing the core tasks for both residents and admins as the app moves through its testing phase.
Outcomes — to be validated
- 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.
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.
What I simplified
- 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.
What changes, from the old way to the new.
Admins spent hours every week on repetitive approvals and record-keeping.
Registration, approval, and check-in happen on their own.
Residents had to message a person and wait to learn their status.
Residents check their own status anytime, on their own screen.
Coordinators were interrupted mid-event by people asking about slots.
Coordinators get their event back — zero status interruptions by design.
Event details were buried in WhatsApp chat history.
One shared source of truth everyone can see.
Hard metrics — task completion, time saved — are being validated in usability testing now.
The app.
Key moments from the resident and admin experience — final screen captures to be added.
Event List
to be added
Wizard
to be added
Screen
to be added
What I'd carry forward.
What I learned
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.
What I'd improve
Formal usability testing with a defined sample size, to move the impact metrics from "to be validated" to measured.