LivShare-Making Co-living Simple!

7 min readJan 10, 2024

LivShare envisions a solution to the co-living challenge — a streamlined platform providing intuitive, transparent, and fair management of shared expenses, responsibilities and services between flatmates

(P.S. It also helps rental owners streamline rental management)

Project was designed as capstone under mentorship of Saurabh Singh, for CollejTM- UX Talent Platform founded by Prasad Kantamneni.

Current Scenario:

A significant majority of people’s lives are spent living with flatmates. In current dynamics of shared living the burden of managing things lies on an individual or is inconsistently divided. This results in frustration, misunderstandings, and an overall lack of clarity in managing things as explained by the illustrtion below. Research here.

Who are Our Users?

Simple, anyone living unsatisfactorily in a shared rental arrangement. Still, let us categorize for technicality.
(Priority to needs of students and working professionals, as people have flatmates mostly in this phase of life)

How is it any different from the existing apps, you say? Let us broaden the scope and understand what’s missing by introducing another usergroup interacting regularly with flatmates

Let us understand how these 2 usergroups interact with each other and how does LivShare simplify it.

What are these problems, you say?

Out of the multiple identified issues, which you can find in the user persona documentation to consolidated scenario for workflows here, let us talk about the one’s faced by most people.

Now, some of the issues faced by owners:

Validation:

I conducted a survey to check the validity and frequency of identified issues. You can check survey here. Below are the findings.

An important factor is the time people are willing to spend⌚ logging things, after which it starts feeling like a chore😩
LivShare contains pre-defined categories and standard settings to reduce effort! (IMPROVE PRODUCT ADOPTION AND USE)

Behind the Scenes:

You can check all the iterations of workflows and wireframes here.

Introducing LivShare: For stress-free co-living experience.

You can check the prototype below. Below are the some of the main features.

Feature 1: Expense Manager:

Adding and splitting expenses, the smart way!

Imagine you (Rohan) are living with your 3 flatmates and have a guest 🙋🏼‍♂️ over. You go and buy groceries 🍞🥑 and your guests end up buying a few more ➕ items which was billed together. She wants to pay for her items and share of the common bill, so you (Rohan) opens LivShare, add and split the expense accurately and easily.

Don’t you think recording recurring and one-time common expenses with flatmates becomes a hassle due to differing interpretations, naming conventions, and the tedious task of logging expenses monthly?

Imagine you guys need to pay rent💸 recurring on the 23rd day of every month.📅 And, so you won’t forget, get a reminder everytime

With LivShare, you can automatically add settings like recurring date, reminders🔔, who will pay and how it will be split!
By introducing pre-defined categories like bills (rent, water, electricity, etc) and settings for recurring expenses, it reduces⬇️ the effort 😣 required to log recurring 🔁 expenses and bills regularly.

You say, those are some intersting features relevant to flatmates. But, how is it different from other apps?
You can make payments directly, like sending rent to the owner by linking your bank account!

And after every common payment from the app, you can decide if you want to set it up as a recurring expense! EXPENSE RECORDING AND PAYMENT in a single flow!

You can also choose to make payment first and add details later. Or, vice versa.

Feature 2: Task Manager:

Simplifying Chore Charts!

Managing tasks while retaining a positive atmosphere among flatmates is a difficulty most of you understand. Dividing tasks amongst everyone fairly and being enthusiastic for allotted work is never easy and because dividing chores takes so much time, people abandon the process and go back to chaos.

According to a study and my survey on why people abandon home management apps:

19% people abandon the process due to the effort required in using it. They lose motivation. So how do we retain people and reduce their effort while appreciating the progress?

By introducing
1. Pre-defined tasks (dry laundry, grocery shopping, etc)
2. Auto suggestions to quickly add tasks
3. Create a chore chart easily according to people’s preferred methods: preference based allocation😌, rotation system🔄 and randomization🔀.

Let’s take another scenario: You (Rohan) and your flatmates want to create a chore chart for the month where you have tasks with varying frequencies, allotted to different people in different order, etc. You simply open LivShare and add all the tasks together or one by one

Additional: Reminding people to add tasks for the day and integrating the already set up tasks/ chore chart to the google calendar so that it becomes a part of people’s daily habit of checking their calendar and directs them to the app for more related information

Feature 3: Shared Service and Visitor Manager:

There are multiple situations where flatmates have to decide who wants to use a particular common service.

Imagine a scenario where you invite friends or relatives and the common services are in-use even after intimating🤷‍♀️ or if a flatmate is over-using common services/spaces meant for all!💢

You (Rohan) is frustrated with the unnaounced parking system among th flatmates, so he decides to create a schedule for all, so that flatmates are aware of their time and there is no double booking.

It gets difficult co-ordinating and informing of plans. There is a chance of people forgetting too. No more.

Introducing the Service Manager!

Now with a click of a button you can inform when a particular space or service is occupied and schedule it whenever required. This informs all the other tenants who are using a service/ space, the duration and the frequency!

Let’s go to the flipside. What opportunities can we use to build a seamless connection with owners? First let us recall rental owner types:

Rent and Bills Payment and Collection
Single/Multiple Property Maintainence
Single source for all tenant interaction and information
Conflict Management and Communication Channel

Feature 4: Rental Manager

Rent reminders

Remind flatmates of rent dues with a single click and always be updated on due dates and rental status

Simplify Rental Management!

Get all the complaints/ requests in one location with easy monitoring on the status of complaints with the Rental Details Screen

Conflict Management and Communication Channel:

A lot of problems can be sorted by a regulated communication channel between owner and tenant, with most survey responses stating the need for clear communication.

A chat and thread feature is added to deal with raised issues and for regular check in, so people can manage all things in a single app.