Duration: Apr - July 2021
Team: Bing Liu, Mengzhe Ye, Daqi Shi, Ruwen Hu, Yitong Du
My Role: Conducted user
research, prioritized user flows and created wireframes and iterations
Context
Yirental is a home rental platform with over 2000,000 users. The three main stakeholders of this app are homeowners, renters, and property managers. They are dedicated to optimizing the rental experience for all platforms.
Challenge
During our research, we realized that homeowners often feel the struggle to find reliable and credible property managers, and users have voiced their concerns regarding the inefficiency and lack of accessibility in managing rental documents.
Solution
To address these related customers' pain points, we think it would be impactful to build a platform that can support the homeowners' search experience and at the same time optimize the document management flow between property managers and homeowners.
Impact
98%
SATISFACTION RATE
An excellent indicator of a product's design and functionality aligning well with user needs and expectations.
25%↑
TASK SUCCESS RATE
Users reported that they can complete a task using the new feature without any hurdles.
My Contribution
➯
I created user flows, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes of a search portal and file manager features that promoted more flexibility, control, and efficiency for end users.
I conducted the user interviews with participant and translated research findings into actionable feature concepts based on tests and semi-structured interviews with 6 interviewees.
➯
I worked with the developer team to design and prototype through regular design reviews to ensure the designs were aligned with our business goals, user needs, and design guidelines
➯
Secondary
Research
We conducted a competitor analysis focusing on three similar rental platforms to provide similar services similar to Yirental and analyze their strengths and weaknesses through some concrete examples.
Primary
Research:
Persona
The team interviewed property managers who provide services to different types of rental properties. During our conversations with homeowners, these participants suggested they are managing their homes independently or as property managers. We synthesized the results from the semi-structured interviews and consolidated the interview findings into a persona.
Insights
There is no much difference in commission fee, most property management companies charge a monthly fee of between 8% – 12% of the monthly rent collected.
Due to the excessive documents required for managing the property, most owners do not want to keep tracking all documents sent by property managers.
Homeowners generally prefer to search for special maintenance service on their own rather than asking their property managers for potential contact references.
Only limited reviews are available online. There are no detailed reviews about the property managers' service quality and how he/she is knowledgable enough.
💫
How might we support homeowners to find property managers and also manage document management flow efficiently?
💫
Ideation
With our research findings and personas in mind, our team brainstormed some potential features to solve the challenges users face. I conducted the priority matrix to identify high-priority features and help the team to manage time efficiently.
As a team, we decided to work on the development of these four features.
In-app Chat
Document
Management
Sort and Filter
Review
System
Lo-Fi Wireframes
The team worked together and created several iterations of the Lo-Fi versions of each feature. The first challenge is how might we integrated new features within the original app.
User Testings
Users' comments from usability testing, the main problems encountered focusing on three main areas:
Mi-Fi Iteration
Based on the insights collected from the usability testing sessions, I went back to the prototypes and iterated the design solutions. High fidelity prototypes were produced using Material Design Guideline to represent our final design solutions.
Feature 01
Better Search Experience
Users can now easily filter by management type and rental type.
Feature 02
In-app message
Adding tooltips including toolbar to save the documents.
Feature 03
Review Page
Easy access the review task. Recent tasks tab encourages users to review the service.
Final Screens
Here's the latest prototype with some of our updated changes and user flow.
Search and find
Filter tabs help home owners to find ideal property managers
In-app Chat
In-app chat helps homeowners and property managers negotiate and send documents
Document
Folders containing information help people to categorize quotes, rental documents and listings.
Take Aways
It is essential to maintain active communication with our design team members, particularly with clients. This enables us to draw inspiration from their work and features. For example, we thoroughly examined the homeowner flow for tenant search and discovered that the application component was a significant source of inspiration for our quote feature design.
It is important to conduct the parallel prototyping while we iterated our designs. Parallel prototyping helps us reach better solutions by encouraging a more diverse set to share with stakeholders.
What We Could Do if Given More Time
Property manager sign-up and login feature - Right now PM is sharing the same user group with homeowners. It would be great to have their unique sign-up flow and pre-fill some professional information ahead of time.
Homeowner creates "looking for PMs" type of listing flow - it would be interesting if this flow can be shared with the normal "create listings" flow. What's even better is homeowners can switch from a normal listing to a "looking for PMs" listing.
