Problem:

Like many sources of data in real estate, there often lacks a central place for asset managers to easily find accurate leasing data. Understanding your different leases across your building or even portfolio are vital to driving better returns for investors. Asset managers are expected to be able to quickly understand and report to their partners about the state of their leases and the impact of vacancies on their bottom line. 

Team & ROLE:

For this project, I worked closely with our Product and Client Success teams to better understand users' needs when thinking about leasing. I was responsible for establishing the finished user flows and visual treatment for this feature. Our key stakeholders were our Head of Product, Product Manger, CTO, and Head of Client Experience.

Design Process:

Since my time at Waypoint, one of the key contributions I have helped add to the Product Process is implementing a more clearly defined design process. I worked closely with our Head of Product and Engineering team to adapt and implement a design process within our existing product process.

Our new process is broken into 3 parts: Concept Design, UI Sketches, and Visual Design.

Concept Design:

This phase of our new process falls heavily on our Product Manager's side. I worked closely with our PM during this stage to better understand the data associated with leasing, core user stories, and user flows. Initial designs were created in the form of concept screens and shared with potential clients to gauge interest and product market fit.

UI Design Sketches:

With user stories defined, I used Balsamiq to crate UI wireframe prototypes of the leasing dashboards for both an asset level view and group level view of our leasing dashboard. Being able to prototype at this fidelity helped us to quickly iterate on how the data was represented and what interactions were confusing.

During this phase we also ran multiple internal user tests where we asked our teammates to assume different personas and complete tasks using the prototype. We discovered several interactions that we were able to simplify or eliminate entirely from our MVP version, which also helped to distill and clean up the UI

Visual Design:

With solid user flows, interactions, and visual design decisions reached during the UI Design phase, we were ready to add visual polish and refinement in the Visual Design phase. I led the visual design and exploration for the visual design screens and used InVision to create a working prototype of the hi-fidelity designs. This feature is on the cusp of being ready to be handed over to engineering to be built! This has been another exciting example of creating something brand new to the product that leverages some of the components and interactions from our Variance Reporting feature.

Impact:

While this feature is still waiting to be built, we anticipate it will have a high level of impact for many of our existing and potential clients because it has been a commonly asked for feature. This has also been one of the first features we have designed from start to finish with our newly implemented design process which has helped us to tighten our iteration cycles and spend more time on the flows and interactions before moving into the visual stage. This process has also helped us to get more people from across the company involved in the design process earlier.

Lessons Learned:

For the most part, this is still largely to be seen after it is built and shared with customers. To speak to the process again, and to compare this feature to earlier projects I've led, this feature has helped to increase clarity with both our back and front end engineers and our Product and Design team. Focusing on certain criteria for each step of the design has helped us to make decisions faster and gain alignment amongst the Product team.