Reconstructed User Experience
Denali Leasing
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Role
Team Lead
Product Designer
Team
Heather Sharp, Challis Debenham,
Maddy Howard
The Problem
Denali Leasing owned several rental properties in the Western States. I found that in directing the management of these properties, the residential units took significantly more time and effort to manage than any of the other properties.
Objectives:
Improve efficiency by decreasing amount of time required for managing properties.
Improve tenant relations through follow up and clear communication with tenants.
Decrease costs by reducing amount of time required to process applications and get tenants moved in.
Empathize
In order to better understand the issues from the tenants’ point of view, we called tenants and asked them a few questions in regards to the move-in process and their interactions with property management. After transcribing the conversations, we then coded the responses for repeating themes.
Main Insights
Unclear application process
Lease signing a huge bottleneck
Applications often partially filled by applicants
No follow up once someone moved in
Unsure how to contact management after move-in
After looking at the customer journey, we realized that the contract signing process took an unnecessary amount of steps, and tenants received very little welcome or instruction before their move-in, and minimal contact after they moved in. There was also unnecessary back and forth between the tenants and the property managers.
Define
After reviewing the tenant data, we redefined the problem we were trying to solve:
Spring Creek Tenants need a resource and process to allow them to easily interact with property management before and after move-in.
Ideate
After defining our problem, we then ideated on the best solution. During the ideation session, we wrote a list of 75 potential solutions to the defined problem. We then organized the ideas into categories:
Rational: logical solutions
Delight: most likely to give users high degree of satisfaction
Darling: our favorite ideas
Hail Mary: ideas that are riskier or likely unviable
We then voted on the best ideas in each category by marking a heart on the sticky notes. After we tallied the votes, we landed on the following solutions:
Build a basic website for tenants to interact with property management
Change the format of the application
Digitize the lease signing process and outsource tenant screening
Prototype
Before building the website for the tenants, we reevaluated and refined the user journey to reduce the back and forth between the tenant and property management, outsource the bottlenecks, and improve follow-up once tenants moved in.
Website
We then built a website for tenants with the following pages:
Application Process
This page outlined the application process for prospective tenants, so they’d know how and when they’d be contacted as they moved forward with the entire application process.
Contact Information
This page had the contact information for key members of the property management team and the landlord. We also included who was who and descriptions of roles, so tenants would know who to contact in various situations.
Community Resources
This page had resources to help new tenants set up their utilities and navigate their new town.
Applications
We also fixed the actual application in order to increase our application rate. Instead of one long page with boxes and boxes of information to fill out, we made the following changes:
Change format from one long form with lots of boxes to shorter pages
Progress bar on the bottom to help the applicant understand where they are in the process
More required fields so we get the information we need
Before making any changes to the application, I made several wireframes to quickly illustrate my vision before making bigger changes.
Final Prototypes
Test
To improve our beta website, we conducted Zoom interviews with several tenants, where we had them share their screen and we watched as they navigated the website. We then asked for feedback on what they liked and what would be improved through “I like, I wish, What If” statements.
Insights
Add a form for maintenance so tenants can submit requests on the website
Move the location of the “About” section
Tenants loved the utility contact list under Community Resources
Results
After six months of having the website, we tested it’s efficacy by comparing average time to process applications, number of applicants, and days complete maintenance requests before and after the website launched.
App. Processing Time
Through our improved online portal experience, we shortened the amount of time spent processing applications from 5 hours on average to 2.7 hours. This resulted in a 54% reduction in costs and saved us thousands of dollars.
Num. of Applicants
Our online application portal also increased the number of applications we received by 25%, which allowed us to increase our average rents by 6.5% due to the increased demand.
Maintenance Requests
By using the new maintenance request portal, we decreased the average number of business days to complete maintenance requests 1.1 days, which resulted in a cost reduction of 20% and an increase of tenant satisfaction rate by 10%.
In order to improve the reliability of this data, we would need to follow up with more future tenants who used this feature as they were looking for a place to live.