Redesigning a City Corporation's Civic-Grievance App for First-Time Smartphone Users (Kannada/English, Figma)

This B.Des graduation project redesigns "NammaDoor", the civic-grievance app of a fictional mid-sized city corporation in Karnataka, for people who have only recently started using smartphones — street vendors, domestic workers, auto drivers, homemakers and senior citizens who are comfortable with WhatsApp voice notes and UPI but struggle with forms, menus and English labels.

The existing app, like many public-service apps, was designed around the corporation's departments: users must pick a department, a sub-category, a ward number and a location from a list before they can report a garbage pile or a broken streetlight. Research showed that first-time users abandon the flow early, call a councillor instead, or ask a younger relative to file the complaint.

The project follows a full design process: contextual inquiry with 15–20 residents across three wards, personas and journey maps, a heuristic evaluation of the current app against Nielsen's ten heuristics, three rounds of Figma prototypes, and moderated usability tests measuring task success, time on task, errors and the System Usability Scale (SUS). The redesign introduces photo-first reporting, automatic location, picture-based categories, voice description in Kannada, a plain-language status tracker and large touch targets, and checks everything against WCAG 2.2 and the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). Final deliverables are a clickable prototype, a design system, a process document, a portfolio and a jury presentation.

Abstract

Civic-grievance apps are meant to give every resident a direct line to the city, but their interfaces often assume literacy in English, familiarity with menus and knowledge of how the corporation is organised. This project studies how first-time smartphone users in a Karnataka city try to report civic problems, evaluates the existing app, and redesigns it through three iterations tested with real users. Success is measured by task completion, time on task, error counts and SUS scores before and after the redesign.

Introduction

Cheap data and UPI have brought millions of people online in the last few years. Many of them are fluent with a handful of apps — messaging, video, payments — but new to anything that asks them to navigate categories and fill forms. The corporation's app is a typical example: it offers complaint categories named after departments ("Solid Waste Management", "Electrical"), requires ward numbers most residents do not know, and shows status updates in bureaucratic language.

Existing design vs proposed design

• Existing: department-first navigation; English-first labels with partial Kannada; text-only categories; manual ward selection; six screens before submission; status labels such as "Forwarded to AEE"; small tap targets and low-contrast grey text.
• Proposed: photo-first flow — take a photo, confirm the pin, pick a picture-category, optionally record a voice note, submit; full Kannada/English parity with a one-tap switch; automatic ward from location; a status tracker in plain words with expected dates; large targets, high contrast and support for system font scaling.

Research gap

Guidelines such as GIGW and WCAG set minimum standards, and there is a large literature on usability testing, but few published design projects in India document how first-time smartphone users actually attempt civic reporting and test redesigns with them in their own language. This project contributes that evidence and a reusable pattern set.

Feasibility

• Research access: participants are recruited through a residents' welfare association, a vendors' group and a senior-citizens' club, with informed consent.
• Tools: Figma and FigJam run in a browser; testing needs only a phone, a screen recorder and a notebook.
• Scope: the project is a design and research deliverable — a tested prototype and design system — not a production app, which keeps it achievable in one semester.

First-time smartphone users in Indian cities are the residents most affected by uncollected garbage, broken streetlights, water leaks and potholes, yet they are the least able to use the official grievance app. The existing app's department-first structure, English-heavy labels, long forms and bureaucratic status messages cause many to abandon the reporting flow or depend on others, so their complaints are either not recorded or routed informally without tracking.

The problem this project addresses is: how can the civic-grievance app be redesigned so that a first-time smartphone user can report a common civic problem in Kannada or English, without help, in under two minutes, and understand what is happening to the complaint afterwards? The redesign must be grounded in research with those users, tested through iterations, and meet recognised accessibility guidelines.

In scope

• Resident-facing flows: onboarding and language choice, reporting a complaint, tracking status, confirming resolution and giving feedback.
• Six common categories: garbage, streetlights, drainage, water supply, roads and stray animals.
• Research with 15–20 participants and usability testing with 6–8 participants per round.
• A Figma design system with bilingual type scale, colour tokens, icons and components.

Out of scope

• Staff-side dashboards for corporation engineers.
• Back-end development, integration with the corporation's systems and a production release.
• Languages other than Kannada and English (the system is designed to add them later).
• Formal accessibility audit with screen-reader users beyond a basic check.

The project follows the Double Diamond design process — discover, define, develop, deliver — with usability testing closing each iteration. It runs for about 18 weeks.

Testing protocol: moderated sessions on the participant's own phone where possible, in their chosen language, using think-aloud; four core tasks (report garbage with photo, report a streetlight without a photo, check the status of an earlier complaint, confirm a resolved complaint); metrics recorded per task; SUS administered orally in Kannada or English at the end.

Ethics: informed consent read aloud; no names, phone numbers or faces in the portfolio; recordings stored offline and deleted after analysis.