Length: 2 months
Role: Product designer (UX/UI)
Skills: UI design, User flows, Wireframing, Prototyping, User testing, Design system and Information architecture
The Brief
FirstPort are a residential property maintenance service provider looking to improve their current “Your Property Overview” (YPO) portal by improving the usability, discoverability and look and feel. They wanted to enhance the ability to have better relationships with their current and future tenants occupying the buildings they manage, whilst helping to better communicate the value FirstPort delivers.
To do this we had to establish a brand new design and information architecture that helps them achieve this goal and supports any future functionality builds.
The Challenge
There was already a platform in place allowing tenants to complete tasks such as reporting an issue, paying a bill, contacting their property manager etc. but it wasn’t very user friendly and was clunky at the best of times. So I began by quickly creating a set of variations (see examples above) building from what they currently offer but enhancing the UI and some navigation where I saw fit. These experiments allowed us to quickly test with users, giving us a better understand of what information and actions were most important to them.
Initial Research
To really get to know and understand the mindset of the tenants we organised three groups of project team to visit and set up a stand in the foyer of a selection of their building, interviewing as many willing tenants as we could when they entered and exited the buildings. This wasn’t only a great opportunity to talk directly with their customers but also gave us a first-hand experience on how tenants communicate with the building managers and other tenants.
The Process
Based on our mapping and clustering of customer needs from our interviews and UX review of the current build, we designed a scalable IA to provide high impact features whilst reducing the effort of use and built a platform for the future.
Help & Support
The most important aspect of the project was to help users report and manage any maintenance issues. The new reporting flows allowed users to submit an issue in just three clicks. It also surfaced all similar issues that other tenants in the same building complex that are currently in progress of being fixed, removing the event of any issue being reported twice, as well as giving the user the option to add new information to the same issue. Giving tenants full visibility of all jobs/issues that were currently in progress in their building through the new ‘Maintenance Tracker’ made it the first point of call before reporting an issue.
The Outcome
Created new digital brand assets and guidelines to be used across future builds
Designed a scalable IA to provide new features and reduce effort of use
Built a platform for the future