At long last, we’re proud to announce the latest enhancement of our hassle-free city living mission at Weave Living. We’re thrilled to launch our very own Weave App into the hands of our residents. The release also happily coincides with the opening of our latest building Weave Studios – Olympic.
The Goal
We wanted to develop the app to provide a single platform for everyone to communicate with us and to free our customers and teams from emails!
The Functions
More than just a platform to communicate with us, we’re excited to enhance our hassle-free city living offerings with these functions to name a few:
- Viewing and registering for events
- Booking maintenance requests
- Ordering extra amenities
- Viewing our Weave Living discounts
- Smart key: unlocking doors
- Viewing our neighbourhood recommended eats and drinks
Development Journey
It’s been an interesting journey, having to balance needs and services from differing parties. Whether that’s to our residents, operations, or experience team, and getting differing input that we need to translate into a cohesive service for all.
We received some interesting requests like being able to see on the Weave App when the Nintendo Switch or Kitchen was free to use. We loved the creativity of the ideas, although we need to ensure that these ideas were realistic enough to implement as much as we would’ve loved to include them all.
Challenges
We had to spend some time integrating all the different services we wanted to incorporate into the Weave App. These services range from data from our property management system, custom-built content management system, and weather service to digital key functionality while still creating and developing more features to come in the meantime...
We also had to focus on balancing the use of flow between all the teams working on this Weave App. From managing the app developers building the structure, functions, and buttons, or for our Experience Team wanting to make sure the user experience runs smoothly for our residents and enabling our operations team to react in real-time, faster than email!
Learnings
We learnt that a lot of the UX isn’t what we initially thought, we needed to do lots of testing and multiple revisions. Building the app isn’t also just about making it pretty but making sure the logistics work for both the customers and our internal teams (backend and front). Not only does the Weave App need to be easy for the residents to enjoy our events and services but also easy for our operations team to pick up requests and handle them at an improved reaction time.
Rewarding Moments
It’s highly rewarding to see the Weave App finally live with users using it. After solely using a whole month to do the complete flowchart and gathering requirements at the very beginning, we couldn’t even start coding until the data flow made sense for each of our teams.
The fact that we were able to deliver the project over a 6-month development time also feels very good. It's great to see the Weave App as a better hassle-free experience for our residents rather than our previous web portal.
The Most Exciting Features
I want to say the digital key, but I don’t want to say digital key. Technically this is the most exciting part because you can forget your key but not your phone. Although the feeds for searching, posting, and push notifications to get rid of email communications are pretty great too.
It’s also good for people to use our event registration function, showcasing all the benefits and perks for our residents. If issues do come through, we have a better channel to communicate and service our customers.
We’re also working on including new functions such as seeing the availability of the laundry machines to conveniently see when it’s available without having to go check. We’re always open to taking new feedback and incorporating it into exciting upcoming features for our residents to discover.
Looking Forward: The Future of the Weave App
When it’s safe to travel again, and when we open elsewhere, we can’t wait to see people travelling between Weave Living. Whether it’s Hong Kong, Singapore, or Australia to use the same app to access different buildings or register to attend events across our homes.
