One lesson I’ve learned from my previous experience is that “Think Big first, think Small second”. So in this case study, I am going to apply the “Dimond” philosophy on each stage to spread out ideas first and then narrow them down.

As an apartment resident, I have been using multiple apps for maintenance. However, all of them are more focused on reporting in-unit issues and less aimed at solving problems within the community. Residents in my apartment are still using posters, emails, or other inefficient approaches to report issues they observed around the community.

As soon as I picked this topic, two products were emerging in my mind: RentCafe and Nextdoor. By analyzing these two products, I come up with a brief image of what I want to create.

After analyzing these two apps, an idea burst in my mind: What if I create a product that enables community members to report their issues, and meanwhile, share these issues to each other, so that they could have a better awareness of what’s happening around them and potentially help each other. So far, it’s still a very vague concept with many assumptions to be validated via user research, which I will dive deeper at next stage.

With the concept above defined, I start reviewing the topic again word for word, trying to give a more specific scope to my idea.

From the last stage, I’ve created a brief idea based on my assumption. Now, it’s time to dive deeper into user research and validate these assumptions with more user inputs. Here, I had a casual interview with my wife, and come up with these two personas based on our conversation.

Based on the user research above, I am going to summarize users’ needs and pain points, which will help illustrate my design direction.

Since I’ve had a basic understanding of my two user groups, depicting the story between users and products would be the next step on my roadmap.

To cultivate a seamless user experience, the ideal solution should be like:

With all research findings concluded, I am ready to assign a clearer definition and mission to my solution “Any Issue”

By far, I have set up a general skeleton for my solution. Now it’s time to take one more step further to clarify the user workflow.

To design a robust solution, I am going to map out the system hierarchy to clarify “What to include” and “How different components connect”.

With sketches created, I want to take one step further and translate vague design ideas into digitalized lo-fi screens. As a side note, within the limited time, I decided to prioritize the resident’s experience and exclude the manager’s flow from the story.

Even with the lo-fi screens set up, there are still tons of details ahead of final deliverables that require reasonable decision making. Here is an example of how I picked one path among multiple choices.

Before jumping to the final deliverables, I’d love to do my research and collect some inspirations to help set up the design tone.

With all efforts above, I am ready to enter the final stage: Hi-Fi Mockups.

In reality, hi-fi design is never the destination of a project. To ensure the best user experience, designer needs to pass several rounds of testing, including Accessibility, Scalability, Responsibility, Internationalization, etc. Here’s an example to demonstrate how I use “Color Blind”, a Figma plugin to evaluate one screen’s accessibility against vision disabilities.

No design is perfect. Limited by time and resources, I was unable to include all the details into consideration. At the very end of this case study, I’d like to share some thoughts of how I would possibly further polish this project in the future.