Improving the experience of FirstPort tenants and highlighting the value they deliver

FirstPort is a residential property management company looking to improve its 'Your Property Overview' portal. The objective was to significantly enhance usability, improve discoverability, and modernise the overall experience.

Beyond visual improvements, the wider ambition was to reposition the portal as a key touchpoint in the tenant relationship, shifting it from a functional tool to a product that builds trust, increases transparency, and clearly communicates the value FirstPort delivers.

I was responsible for defining a new product direction, including the design system and information architecture, ensuring the platform could scale to support future services while addressing immediate usability challenges.

While the existing platform supported core tasks such as reporting issues, paying bills, and contacting property managers, the experience was fragmented and unintuitive. Key actions were difficult to find, and the overall journey created unnecessary friction for tenants.

Rather than incrementally improving the current experience, I took an exploratory approach of rapidly producing a set of design directions that reimagined the structure, hierarchy, and interaction patterns of the platform.

These early concepts enabled us to align stakeholders quickly and test with users, helping to validate assumptions and identify what truly mattered. This approach ensured we were solving the right problems before committing to a single direction.

To ground the work in real user needs, I completed in-context research across multiple FirstPort managed buildings. Conducting intercept interviews in building foyers, speaking directly with tenants in their day-to-day environment. This allowed us to capture immediate, experience-based feedback and observe how tenants interacted with both the physical and digital aspects of property management.

These insights revealed not just functional needs, but also underlying frustrations particularly around lack of visibility, duplicated effort, and unclear communication. This shaped a broader opportunity to not just improve usability, but trust and transparency across the tenant experience.

Synthesising insights from field research and a UX audit of the existing platform, I defined three exploratory prototypes each testing different approaches to navigation, content hierarchy, and task prioritisation.

Through iterative usability testing, clear behavioural patterns emerged. Tenants consistently prioritised paying bills, viewing and tracking existing issues and reporting new issues.

From a product perspective, this reframed the portal as a task-driven experience, where speed, clarity, and visibility were critical. I translated these insights into a new, scalable information architecture designed to surface high-value actions upfront, reduce cognitive load, and support future feature expansion without increasing complexity.

Throughout this phase, I worked closely with stakeholders across product, engineering, and customer support to ensure the proposed direction balanced user needs with operational realities.

Improving how tenants report and manage maintenance issues became the cornerstone of the experience.

I redesigned the reporting flow to reduce friction significantly, enabling users to submit an issue in as few as three steps. More importantly, I introduced system-level thinking to address root problems, not just symptoms.

The new experience surfaces existing issues within the same building, reducing duplicate reports while allowing tenants to contribute additional context. This not only improves efficiency for users, but also reduces operational overhead for property managers.

To further strengthen transparency, I introduced a 'Maintenance Tracker' giving tenants real-time visibility of all ongoing issues in their building. This shifted behaviour from reactive reporting to informed decision-making, and positioned the portal as a trusted source of information.