For most property owners, investing in real estate was an opportunity to make money in their sleep. Yet as they’ve engaged in the industry, their lives have become consumed by maintenance-related tenant calls. Our client approached us with a vision to create a software product targeted to property owners that tackles this problem.

Through conducting feature ideation workshops with our stakeholders, we outlined a high-level product roadmap. Within the first 4 months, the plan was to deliver a V1 mobile product, where the core features were:

Through working closely with my senior designer, we began creating low-fidelity iterations of the property owner dashboard and presented them to the wider internal design team. The initial concept for this dashboard was to display all new maintenance updates at the top so that property owners can easily oversee the status of their properties, with secondary information below.

Amid designing for V1, it became apparent that we didn't have the foundation to execute many of the product concepts for V1. We first need to test how property owners interact with the product model and gather insightful data before proceeding. We don’t want to rebuild everything from the bottom if we discover that fundamental aspects of the product need refinement.

For this beta version, we introduced a DoorWay admin to perform the heavy manual work behind the scenes. Their primary role is updating issue ticket statuses, confirming quotes, and handling repair scheduling with tenants. Moreover, instead of automating scheduling, tenants can text admins via SMS to coordinate maintenance repair scheduling manually.

With the help of the admin's manual work, property owners can log in to the platform and view their issue tickets as they would in V1. They can see status updates, approve/deny quotes, etc.. to maintain oversight over their properties.

Moreover, can customize their level of involvement in maintenance issues as we planned. Both in onboarding and their settings, they can denote the maintenance issues they are interested in to stay in control. This concept was crucial for us to include in the beta version, as we wanted to test how much oversight property owners need. Is this too much? Too little? Gaining customer insights on this model before implementing the process is vital.

Our client expressed that they see this product expanding beyond the maintenance side of property management. Areas such as accounting integration or rent collection have been at the back of their mind for future versions. Thus, to tackle branding, we needed to create a brand voice that was broad enough for the future.

We ultimately decided to focus our brand around conveying the quality of our work and approach to property management. This aspect of the product will persist, regardless of how it evolves. Thus, we considered this when developing our core brand assets,

V1 is what we’re working toward and aiming to launch once we successfully validate it with real-time data and feedback on the product model.

Without a doubt, this project was the most challenging project I've ever produced. Stripping down automated user flows while maintaining the same product model was incredibly difficult due to tight time and development constraints.