Mobile Doorman is a property-management system that excels in the creation of white-labelled apps and management software for luxury apartment complexes.
My role:
PRIMARY: Product Designer, involved in all levels of the design process.
Tools:
Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, UserTesting.com, Google Sheets (Competitor Analysis), Jira.
Team Members:
One VP of Product, and two product designers (as of December 2019, I have been the sole designer for the company).
Project: Regional Dashboard
In an effort to provide regional-level customers with pertinent data regarding the health of their properties, our team sought to design a dashboard that would give users needed metrics in an easy-to-understand layout.
Version of regional dashboard design that existed before my time at Mobile Doorman. I addition to not providing the information that users were wanting, the design had far too much white space, and the data was formatted in a way that spread the elements all over the page.
When Mobile Doorman began in 2014, a handful of contract developers were hired to build the first version of the website and app. There was little direction given for the design, as the goal was to make a product that “worked”.
Fast forward a few years; Mobile Doorman has a working product and large client base, but the design is such that many of the properties that subscribe to it’s services have a difficult time navigating the site and getting the information they need. Specifically for this project, regional-level users (those that have access to and manage multiple properties) want to have a birds-eye view of how their properties are doing, and have the metrics to validate those findings.
I was the sole designer on this project, receiving support from the VP of Product and input from the quality assurance and development teams.
User Interviews
My first step in designing this new dashboard was to speak with regional managers from a wide variety of property companies and seek to understand what they were doing to gauge the health of their properties. I spoke to seven different regional managers, and received survey data from even more. Most had processes that was dissimilar from the others, including custom-made third-party reports, and manual reports created by the property manager at each location.
It was clear that everyone wanted an automated system that gave them metrics for each property. After assessing the data and recognizing the themes, we concluded that these were the metrics that were most important to regional managers:
Maintenance Requests: Per property, how many maintenance requests are currently open and how many of those requests are overdue (over 24 hours old)?
Resident Engagement: Per property, how many residents are regularly using the app?
Staff Response Time: Per property, how long does it take staff to respond to messages and maintenance requests from residents?
Community Building: What events at the properties are garnering the most interest from residents (measured in RSVPs)?
Working in an agile framework, we decided to focus on only these four metrics for the MVP, planning to add upon and iterate on this first ship.
MVP Regional dashboard design. As of the writing of this study, this dashboard is still in production.
Designing
Throughout the design process I usability tested regularly, writing small tests in UserTesting.com to validate the users understanding of how the product works and discover any roadblocks that the design might present. Once the pieces of the design were in place, I usability tested the design with regional managers, who widely accepted and enjoyed our solution.
As of March 2020, this design is still in development.
Demonstration of one of the modals
Next Steps
In the short term, next steps for the regional dashboard will include App Content Update (how regularly properties are adding new content to their respective apps). In addition, we are discussing ways we can score these metrics in order to “gamify” the dashboard, rewarding properties that are doing well.
In the long term, we are looking to do a redesign of the platform, which will include a redesigned side navigation bar.
Future-facing design that declutters the side navigation bar and the introduction of App Content Update.