My Role
UX Lead, working with one other UX designer, one user research coordinator, one product manager, three developers, and two QA team members.
Activities
- Contextual inquiry
- Journey mapping
- Task analysis
- Conceptual model generation
- Wireframing
- Moderated, remote usability testing
- Detailed screen design
Buildium’s property management software
Buildium is a web and mobile application for property management. Over 10,000 customers depend on the software as the backbone of their business.
Customers demanded automatic management fees
Property management companies typically make most of their income through management fees, usually about 10% of rent collected each month. The ability to automatically calculate management fees was one of the highest-voted ideas on our customer idea suggestion forum.
But really, they wanted to be able to pay rental owners sooner
In order to fully understand the environment and the process for which we were solving, we did contextual inquiry with a few local property management companies and had them walk us through scenarios of collecting management fees. What emerged was that, while calculating and collecting management fees was a chore, the urgency around it came from the fact that collecting management fees stood in the way of paying rental owners the remainder of property income after management fees and bills were paid. If rental owners didn’t get their check when they expected it every month, they would call the property managers asking about where the money was. Property managers wanted to be proactive and avoid these calls.
We had the software withhold money for fees so customers could pay their rental owners first
We explored and user tested three wireframe variations and finalized an approach that would allow property managers to pay their rental owners first – a wizard would calculate and withhold money due for bills and management fees automatically. See clickable prototype
Artifacts
