I started by making the app look better.
I ended up making citizens do less.
A UX redesign of the eChhawani app to make it easier for residents to pay their dues, raise complaints and access civic services.
A service-heavy app for a payment-first use case
The eChhawani app offered many civic services, but users had to navigate through a service directory to complete basic tasks. Through user interviews, I found that paying dues was the primary reason people used the app, while the Cantonment Board had also made app-based payment compulsory for all residents.
The original experience
-
01Home Many services were presented with equal priority. Paying dues was buried among them.
-
02Select service Another menu to get through before reaching the property tax form.
-
03Enter details Five fields before users could see what they owed.
A cleaner interface, but the same underlying problem
My first iteration focused on improving the visual design and organization of services. It made the interface cleaner, but it still treated the app as a service directory.
But this wasn't enough.
A cleaner interface didn't solve the real problem. Citizens were still navigating a service directory to accomplish the task they came to the app for.
I moved the home screen from services to pending tasks.
Paying dues was the primary use of the app, so I decided to make pending dues the first thing citizens see while keeping access to other services.
Prioritize the task citizens most often came to complete, without removing access to other services.
I stopped asking citizens to remember their property ID.
Property IDs were difficult to remember and users often referred to their challans. Because properties were already linked to the user's mobile number, I surfaced those properties and let users choose.
Let the system remember what it already knows and ask the user only to choose.
I removed repetitive payment work without removing choice.
Paying each bill separately meant repeating the payment process multiple times. I introduced a Pay All option while keeping individual payment available.
Give citizens both options. I took inspiration from the Pay All pattern used by CRED while adapting it to this context.
I turned an intimidating complaint form into a guided task.
The original complaint form asked for many fields at once. I broke the task into smaller steps so users could focus on one decision at a time.
-
BeforeMany fields at once -
01What is the issue? -
02Tell us more -
03Where is the issue? -
04Review & submit
Progressive disclosure makes the task feel more manageable without removing the information required to submit a complaint.
From navigating services to taking care of what's pending.
The redesigned experience starts with what needs attention, reduces unnecessary work, and still keeps the broader set of civic services accessible.
-
Home -
Select property -
Review & Pay -
File complaint
A cleaner interface isn't always a simpler experience.
The biggest shift in this project was moving beyond visual improvement and focusing on the work citizens actually came to accomplish. This is a design-level redesign; I did not run usability tests on it, so I'm not claiming measured results.
- 01
Start with the user's task, not the interface.
- 02
Let the system do more of the remembering and repetitive work.
- 03
Give users choice without creating unnecessary work.