Problem:

Variance reporting is one of the most painful reoccurring processes for property managers and asset managers alike. With accounting information stored in legacy, unintuitive software running monthly reports becomes an overly complicated, error-prone chore for real estate teams. To get the data from these accounting systems, team members must run reports, analyze the data, and then input comments to explain budget variances for each property. Without a good system in place for version control, teams end up juggling multiple versions of the same reports, using email as a system of record, or even "fat fingering" unintentional errors as a result.

Team & ROLE:

For this project, I worked closely with our Product and Engineering teams to better understand users existing workflows and then to refine the workflow and UX. Along with being heavily involved in the product's concept phase, I led the visual design which included introducing many new styles for the Waypoint product. Our key stakeholders were our Head of Product, CTO, and Head of Client Experience.

Design Process:

Initial Designs:

Early designs were created by an outside design agency prior to my joining the team at Waypoint. They were responsible for the initial layout and capturing some of the feature's key components. 

Perhaps the most important part of what we ended up building, and also the most complicated piece of the design, was the workflow aspect of the variance process. This required that I quickly get up to speed on understanding our users and the various processes around variance reporting. Being new to the team and subject matter, helped to introduce a new approach to the design process and to and surface remaining questions around the feature.

Mid-Level Designs:

With a refined approach to the initial design and specifications we were able to develop updated variance designs. These designs helped drive discussions around user flows and gain alignment amongst the team. Once they were refined enough we shared prototypes of the screens with friends in the industry and internal team members with asset management experience.

Finished Designs:

Based on feedback from our user tests we settled on final designs for our MVP. Being a new feature, the Product team worked closely with our Engineering team during the development of this feature to ensure that details of the specs were accurately communicated and represented. Thanks to the hard work of our Engineering team, they were able to turn around this feature of almost entirely new components within two months. 

Improvements and Enhancements:

After its initial launch, we received feedback from customers that we incorporated into the project to push beyond the initial MVP state. Some of these features included: adding year to date and quarterly variance data, updates to our original report date selector, separating accounts into types like Revenue and Expenses, nesting accounts within a tree structure inside of the table, adding more customization to the threshold parameters, adding explanation types which enables users to perform a new type of analytics on variance reports never before possible, and making it easy to view historical explanations within your current report. 

Impact:

Variance has been one of our largest product features to date and a highlight of the features released in 2017. Our Variance Reporting feature has opened the door to many new pilots and clients since its implementation. The successful implementation of this feature most recently helped Waypoint close a seven figure, two-year contract with the world's largest industrial property company.

Lessons Learned:

Compared to working in the rigid accounting systems and cumbersome Excel sheets they are used to, users have been really excited about our user friendly design. 

Since it's initial launch, Variance Reporting has continued to grow and evolve from it's initial MVP based on user feedback. Knowing what I know now about our users' needs, I would have been curious to have uncovered more of these requirements earlier in the process and then considered how we might have designed parts of this feature differently.