HomeNow, advertising itself as "smart tech for the modern landlord," provides mobile-based software solutions for landlords and property managers to improve tenant communication and property management. However, it lacks a comprehensive web-based dashboard for managing maintenance requests at volume. Over a 3-week sprint, my team developed such a dashboard, enabling landlords and property managers to manage properties, communicate with tenants, handle maintenance tickets, assign vendors, and manage vendor services. We approached the design primarily from the viewpoint of property managers, the user group that drives revenue, but also gained deep insights from experienced tenants and service vendors. Our design principles focused on ease of use, allowing all user groups to communicate and stay informed about routine maintenance matters. User research validated this need, highlighting that "ease of use" varied for property managers, tenants, and vendors. As the product lead, I coordinated a team of four, ensuring smooth transitions from research insights to design decisions and keeping the project on track, resulting in an intuitive interface that efficiently manages routine maintenance tasks.
RESEARCH
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis
User Stories
Journey Mapping
DESIGN
User Flows
Design Studio
Wireframing
Lo-Fi Test Prototype
TEST
Usability Testing
Quantitative Analysis
Qualitative Analysis
ITERATE
Sitemap Revisions
Redesigned Messaging Features
Development of Hi-Fi Prototype
IDENTIFYING USER PROBLEMS
Property managers need digital tools that allow them to easily organize maintenance tickets and vendors, communicate with tenants and vendors, and be notified of recurring issues. Property managers are often frustrated trying to find their available vendors and stay on top of the progress of maintenance jobs.
Service vendors need a better way to interface with residential property managers and update them on the status of jobs. Vendors are often frustrated by the inability to demonstrate why a repair is more complicated than anticipated, and want to easily upload work documents, photos and annotations.
Tenants need a simple solution for communicating with their property manager and staying on top of issues. Tenants often feel left out of the loop on the status of a maintenance request, and want an easy way to notify their property manager of routine maintenance issues and monitor the status of the request.
IDEATING SOLUTIONS
In designing the dashboard, my team prioritized ease of use for property managers, allowing them to easily onboard and maintain their virtual rolodex of service vendors, assign them to jobs in a few clicks, communicate with all parties for individual jobs, and review service status at any time.
Property managers also indicated a high level of concern about minor recurring issues that can become major maintenance issues if left unaddressed. In designing a solution to this problem, we created a feature for property managers to receive alerts when a rental unit has a certain amount of recurring maintenance issues in a set period of time, preventing a small issue from becoming a big issue.
Property managers not only want easy ways to communicate with tenants and vendors on an individual basis, but also want to be able to easily notify an entire building of tenants about a global matter, such as community events, common area maintenance, or parking lot issues. My team developed a solution that allows property managers to easily send and schedule mass notifications for an entire building.
DESIGN
UNDERSTANDING THE USER JOURNEYS AND TOUCHPOINTS FOR EACH USER
Before beginning design, I had my research team develop user personas for property managers, vendors, and tenants to gain a deep understanding of each group's unique goals and needs. From these personas, I created user stories to map out the journeys and touchpoints for each group. In the below, example, a tenant arrives home to find an unexpected plumbing issue.
These user stories served as a foundation for mapping out our wireframes and creating an intuitive system that makes communication easy for property managers, vendors, and tenants alike.
SKETCHING AND WIREFRAMING THE DASHBOARD
In creating the dashboard UI, I held a design studio with my team to quickly generate sketches and dashboard concepts. This process allowed us to quickly get ideas onto paper, give and receive quick feedback on our sketches, and take our best ideas and combine them into a final sketch that served as the basis for our wireframes.
BUILDING A DESIGN SYSTEM
Once the team moved into higher fidelity with design, I worked with my lead designer to build the design system that would be the foundation for the dashboard. Utilizing principles of atomic design, we defined components and interaction states from the smallest level up to the larger elements of the design.
MANAGING MAINTENANCE REQUESTS WITH EASE
In designing the dashboard, I focused the team on streamlining tasks so property managers can get in and accomplish what they need to do in as few clicks as possible. Combined with an intuitive system to onboard and organize service vendors of different types, property managers can review a new maintenance ticket and assign it to an available vendor quickly and easily.
CREATING A COMMUNICATION HUB
Effective communication is not a one-way street, and our user research with property managers, service vendors, and tenants made that clear. Each user group needs effective communication, but for different reasons. The messaging features built into the dashboard were designed with both ease of use and flexibility in mind, allowing quick access to messaging on open tickets, creation of job tickets from messages, and scheduling mass notifications for designated groups.
KEEPING TABS ON LINGERING ISSUES
Ease of mind is just as important as ease of use for property managers. If there is a problem at a building that keeps happening, they want to be made aware of it before it turns into a major problem. In response to this pain point, my team created an alert system so recurring issues can be spotted, brought to the property manager's attention, and tracked.
PROTOTYPE
FINAL THOUGHTS
The HomeNow dashboard is well-designed to meet the most important needs of its different users. This was found to be a major point of focus through our user research, as property managers, tenants, and vendors use this dashboard with very different needs and goals. Despite this, the system must allow these different groups of users to communicate effectively and intuitively transition tasks and workflows between these user groups.
Following launch of the dashboard, further testing and iteration should be performed, including iteration of aspects of the dashboard experience specific to each user group, additional usability testing, and additional features to streamline vendor onboarding and allow property managers to easily manage their virtual rolodex of vendors.
Overall, I'm pleased with the efforts my team made over the course of a 3-week sprint. Working on a very tight timeline, there were often difficulties in managing the team's workload and time management, but strong and constant communication with the team helped me keep everyone on track. In the end, working one-on-one with my lead designer to translate user insights and trust his direction in design decisions yielded great end results for the product, and the resulting depth of the prototype was exactly what our user research called for. While additional iterations will be needed, this is also the nature of product design, and I'm proud of this strong first step forward produced by my team.
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