Roadmapping & Centralizing Task Management

Company: RealPage

Role: UX Designer II

Responsibilities: UX/UI design, customer research, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, user testing

Duration: 6 months

Tools: Figma, Miro

👁️‍🗨️ Overview

At RealPage I was tasked with working on the UX team for mapping out virtualization and centralized task management workflows. After working with teammates to understand in detail what all of these terms meant in the context of property management, I was focused on diving deeper and learning more. This complex team aimed to streamline operations across multiple user personas - from property managers and leasing agents to residents - by creating an integrated platform for task management, workflow visualization, and customer journey optimization.

Challenges:

The property management industry faces unique challenges in coordinating multiple stakeholders, tracking numerous concurrent tasks, and ensuring smooth customer experiences. Our team recognized that existing solutions were often fragmented, requiring users to navigate multiple systems and resulting in reduced efficiency and potential communication gaps.

Our focus was in part to create journey map documentation that would help us understand every step of the customer journey, that weaved through multiple products. We also had a goal of providing concepts for a kanban dashboard for leasing and property staff to be able to filter and navigate through residents at a bird’s eye view, as well as a granular personalized individual resident view.

🎯 Goals

#1. Allow our UX team over centralized task management to research and document the entirety of the resident lifecycle, with an emphasis on crossing between RealPage owned products.

#2. Ideate for a dashboard which enables users to manage residents, with key attention to the resident renewal or move-out stage. Keeping this question in mind: how do we make the move in and renewal process less painful for residents and staff?

My leading question:

How do we understand our own product suite and product-passing workflow to be able to re-build a dashboard for our leasing staff to improve resident and staff happiness?

🔍 Discovery & Design Strategy

Where can we improve in the flowchart?

I mapped out step by step a large section of the resident leasing journey—highlighting the move out workflow below, which includes whether or not residents will choose to stay at the property or move out, and at what lease lengths. I then made flowcharts emphasizing major leasing process touchpoints, adding in areas where automation could be added to alleviate common customer pain points.

User Journey Map:

I then moved on to mapping the entire user journey into sub-actions organized under major actions.

💪 What we did

I surveyed other designers on the team, curious to see where our sore spots were—which workflows were making sense and which ones weren't. I met with our designers, UX architects, and project managers. I found that there was a lot of confusion amongst almost our entire design team over product information-passing. Because RealPage utilizes a variety of different products that weren't necessarily built in mind to be cohesive, I had to be able to map out a product passing workflow and then highlight what exactly was happening each step of the way.

I continued on this path and met with customers from 8 property management companies (PMCs). My core question to customers was most simply to walk me through their process for our selected tasks. One of them being the move-out process, which included renewals.

Service Blueprint:

I created a service blueprint to be able map out our resident and leasing staff actions, what software they're in, whats happening on the front stage, back stage, communication channels, and pain points. I mapped this out in Miro for each step of the resident customer journey.

Problem Area Theme Board:

From customer calls and interviews, I created a problem theme board which would highlight the most mentioned problem areas, from most mentioned to lesser mentioned items. This was an exceptionally helpful exercise in visually stacking problems at certain points in the leasing journey.

✨What did we learn?

With thorough research we were able to highlight what our users major pain points were, as well as finding where our own UX team was struggling to understand an already complex and massive product suite. We identified how and where major leasing actions were lacking. I was able to leverage these frustrations and turn them into opportunities. I was able to provide a research document and hi-fidelity screens with recommended UX changes to the leasing workflow, that would:

Save our customers time - reduce the amount of time leasing staff is spending on repetitive tasks, mass communication and resident placement.
Increase automation throughout the leasing workflow - noting that we can automate much of the offer generation and resident reminder phase.
Reduce the property staffing cost and stress - reducing the long hours and overworked weekend shifts for leasing staff.
Increase property and employee sentiment - streamline move in and move out workflows to let residents get the information they need, when they need it and not wait on direct office communication.
Generate revenue for RealPage - during my research I found that we could be implementing an automated loyalty program that would offer personalized deals to residents and offer connection to local businesses.

The hi-fi screens:

Turning a list view into a fully clickable action-oriented dashboard, with personalized actions for each resident. Allowing leasing staff to quickly support residents across multiple properties with bulk functionality and automated suggestions.