self initiated
Waduls — Public Complaint & Aspiration App
Turning a word for complaining into a route to being heard
- Role
- Product Designer — self-directed research and interface design.
- Scope
- Problem research, information architecture, and interface design for submitting a complaint with a photo or document attached, and routing it to the relevant SKPD (Regional Work Unit) for follow-up.
- Timeline
- Personal project
- Category
- Civic / Mobile
Overview
Written as exploratory research outside working hours, alongside freelance UI/UX work.
Challenge
Three barriers stood between a resident and a resolved complaint: there was no digital facility for aspirations and complaints at all; people did not know which agency to file with; and where apps existed, people did not understand how to use them.
Objective
Provide a mobile information system for public-service aspirations and complaints that a resident could use without knowing the structure of local government.
Approach
Started from the formulation of the problem rather than the interface: what stops someone from complaining, and what happens to a complaint once it is made.
Selected decisions
A complaint is a photo and a sentence. Everything else — deciding which agency handles fallen trees versus street lighting — is the system's job, not the resident's.
Deliverables
Research write-up, complaint submission flow, and interface design.
Outcome
An exploratory research project, published as a written case study. It was not built for production.
Reflection
The routing was the real design problem. Asking a resident to identify the correct Regional Work Unit is asking them to know the org chart of their own local government — the app existed to make that question unnecessary.