For: CoStar Group
Year: 2022-2023
Tools: Maze (research and usability testing), FullStory (analytics), Figma (wireframing and design)
Figma files available upon request.

My Role

Information Architecture, Principal UX, Principal UI, Research

Contributors

Colton Waack - Key Product Manager / Project Management, Research

Kassidy Wallace - Design Systems

James Minior - Product Director

Background

Rental Manager is a web-based management suite featured on Apartments.com that includes property management solutions for online rent payments, screening reports, advertising, and lease management.

A screenshot of the marketing page for Apartments.com Rental Manager

User Types

Customers

  • Generally operate at scale with large portfolios and almost constant turnover of vacancies.

  • Focus mainly on advertising, and generally have other solutions to manage payments, lease documents, and renter management.

  • Have direct relationships with the company through signed sales and customer reps and can manage UX issues or request new features through them.

  • Do not use many of the product’s native features, and prefer to use automated feeds to manage data.

Independent Owners

  • Are acquired, onboarded, and managed entirely through self service.

  • Generally operate at much smaller scale, with smaller portfolios of mostly single family homes that only require attention generally once or twice a month.

  • Are mostly drawn to the ‘little bit of everything’ nature of our product tools largely due to the cost efficiency. This is our key user type for this project.

Project

Frustration Signals

The current Properties Dashboard which served as the de-facto homepage for Independent Owners.

  • The current dashboard is inefficient in onboarding new users or for users who aren’t necessarily interested in advertising at the moment.

  • Navigation can be confusing, and long load times due to architecture inefficiencies punishes ‘incorrect choices’. Users who need to ‘poke around’ get hit with 15-20 second load times on every action which exponentially increases frustration.

  • It’s difficult to know when something needs your attention, and navigating around to get a good handle on things is painful.

Goals

  • Improve time to task and reduce frustration signals by serving relevant pages faster.

  • Improve onboarding for new users.

  • Encourage awareness or utilization of our other products and not just the most popular ones (advertising and online payments)

Headwinds

  • Generally these issues would be addressed through optimizing tech stacks and improvements to UI. But due to reorganizations, these features lost a lot of development support. Solutions needed to be achievable with a smaller team with a little bit less institutional knowledge than the more tenured devs.

  • Implementing broad changes that accomplish our goals but negatively affect Customers who don’t use these tools can be problematic (and will get sales directors yelling at me).

  • Independent Owners tend to ‘set it and forget it’ and operate seasonally, so solutions need to be optimized for the occasional user without any expectation that high usage frequency can help with conditioning.

Solution

  • Create a new dashboard that’s only for Independent Owners.

    • Will exist in a new URL so as to not create any unintended consequences by altering other more established pages and our less experienced developers won’t be exposed to as much tech debt.

    • Exposes full product suite to new users to assist in onboarding.

    • Will be optimized for returning users, making them aware of important or time sensitive statuses and provide an easy way to navigate to pages that address them.

    • Fewer clicks means fewer interactions with load times. Would buy us time by improving user sentiment while we spin up work (and hires) to address the issues more fundamentally.

Version 1: Management Homepage

Placeholder page to achieve two goals early:

  • Serve as groundwork in establishing a new URL and doing the required backend work to ensure this page is only served to Independent Owners and not Customers.

  • Host content that introduces our product suite to new users and provide an easy way to navigate to them.

  • Note: This was a bit of a stealth launch; existing users tend to bookmark the pages they navigated to the most (further illustrating the workarounds that result from a slow and confusing website), and most didn’t even even see the homepage or knew of it’s existence for a while. We were ok with this as the page was better suited for onboarding new users anyway.

Iterations

Two concepts were tested: Product Oriented and Property Oriented.

Testers generally favored Property Oriented; most believed their portfolios weren’t robust enough to make the Product Orientated designs make sense and they liked to see everything in their portfolio relate to a specific property. 

But this wasn’t a universal opinion (and flies against our ambitions to expand these tools to larger portfolios) so we may revisit and present options to suit different users preferences.

Product Oriented concept

Property Oriented concept

Development Challenges

Because our products are developed on different tech stacks, there were some issues with being able to incorporate data from each into one display. Not great as user perceptions of how these tools intersect are much more fluid than what our architecture suggests.

The solution proposed by dev included the use of event emitters and listeners. But setting them up is resource intensive and required multiple teams who had other priorities, so care was made to only do this for essential information. Some features were cut in the design stages as a result.

  • Data prioritization identified based on user behavior according to our analytic data.

    • Payment Balances

    • New Leads

    • Advertisement Status

    • Document Notifications

    • Lease Date data

Version 2: Property Dashboard

Dashboard design assets. Full Figma file is available upon request.

Features

  • Property based layout that lists a users entire portfolio and displays relevant leasing information for each.

  • Direct links to property specific management pages and dashboards.

  • Visible badging to notify users of time sensitive or temporary statuses.

  • A functional mobile design that is vastly improved over the previous dashboard.

Future Iterations

Based on navigation analytics the dashboard has resulted in some improvement to our users general experience; data shows a reduction in frustration signals and less time spent on tasks, as well as an improvement on onboarding speed and new user ‘stickiness’.

Some further improvements to explore:

  • Greater focus on lead management through direct messaging… a feature that is still in the planning stages.

  • Selected roll up data panels more suitable for larger portfolios or mid level brokers.

  • A “Latest Updates” panel to track renter behavior and help managers and renters resolve disputes.

  • Aesthetic font and layout improvements to coincide with am upcoming front end update.