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Rajiv Gandhi Housing Corporation Limited was initiated to make home ownership an affordable reality for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) of the society through effective implementation of Central and State housing schemes. Based on the sub-section you qualify under, the loan amount and the size of house you are eligible to buy is determined. Further, this affordable housing scheme gives preference to women and senior citizens, making allotment of ground floor accommodation compulsory for senior citizens. It is strict about eco-friendly construction too.

The aim of this project was to make the buying process smoother. The home buyers no longer have to go agent or middle man for availability of their house. And also to improve the transparency between government and the citizens.This meant that we needed to design an application that was simple and intuitive to use, culturally appropriate, and written in plain language while still understandable without reading.

Having gone through some of the housing apps that would serve as a competitors like Reall, Redfin, Housing.com etc. I was able to itemize 10 challenges/ key point around which my solutions revolved.

A 3-day workshop was conducted with the stakeholders, and the government officers.

My research encompassed -

• Understating the project hierarchy and its vastness
• Roles and responsibilities of Users at each level
• Tasks that need to be accomplished

Through user interviews, we found our target users were mothers 25 -35 years with a couple of children and a husband who wanted to buy their own house. The families wanted to get an estimate for how much the home would cost. Currently, the man or woman go to the agent and talk through home design and the cost ,the agent walks them through the options and gives an estimate and the agent may charge money to get the client to agree.

The research made it evident how different users would use the app differently. To cater to this, I categorized them into two user profiles based on their goals and tasks

Krishna Kumar - Age 68 - Auto Driver

He is a 68 year old man living with his family in a one-room apartment in the squalid lanes of fazer town in bangalore, he worked at a stainless steel factory earlier and then started driving an auto-rickshaw to make ends meet. krishna kumar has seen some of the harshest realities of life, but that did not deter him from working hard.

Lakshmi - Age 35 - working woman

Laksmi is a bereaved woman, who lives with her two children in a shanty house which is in highly populated urban residental area,mostly closely packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or incompleted infrastructure, and she is also running a roadside food stall business to earn just enough money to buy a house.

I sketched some cards to create a paper prototype to test the user flow and to capture crucial feedback using rapid iterations method from the target users regarding the application's usefulness and usability before diving into the time-consuming and expensive implementation process.