Landlords
We hopped on calls with 20+ landlords from a large range of locations and experience levels and asked about their experience with being a landlord, maintenance orders, and finding contractors.
Results: They all found the process tedious, time consuming, and confusing, especially those who had just entered the industry. Current platforms are unreliable and over saturated, and still require landlords to go out of their way to filter through a large number of contractors on their own.
Contractors
We talked to 10+ contractors and asked about their current work process, asking about what they find difficult about their job and finding projects.
Results: We found that smaller contractors say that finding work is difficult and they find the customer side of their job incredibly draining, as customers are constantly trying to haggle prices. Even after a lot of back and forth with a landlord, the project isn't guaranteed to be theirs.
From our baseline problem validation research, we were able to come up with 3 main pain points:
Pain point #1
Landlords spend too much time and effort looking for contractors.
pain point#2
Contractors don't have stability and spend too much time haggling.
pain point #3
Tenants experience long wait times for their work orders.
Based on these pain points, I created one How Might We statement to streamline my design process. With this question as our guiding question, my team and I started to iterate on potential features that would solve the pain points we discovered.
The bulkiest part of this app design was the user flow. Since there were so many users, we had to make sure that each flow was incredibly thought out to result in the most ideal experience for all use cases.
It's also important to note that this project was under the time constraint of one semester, meaning we had to prioritize which features would make it to MVP.
Our user flow and feature ideation process.
Landlords
Approve a tenant request, approve the contractor for the project, and pay.
Contractors
See currently available projects and accept.
Tenants
Submit work order through the chatbot and have your project completed.
From these baseline user flows, I designed the basic iteration of the 3 flows and rapidly iterated multiple times on each following user and stakeholder interviews and feedback.
The contractor's experience represented an huge design challenge and involved a multitude of iterations. I started by researching other applications with similar user journeys such as Uber for drivers, Upwork and AirBnB. I also tested a range of different interaction design options, including requiring contractors go “live” to accept work orders, sending contractors notifications when there was a work order in their area.
Notifications Only
"Start Work"
My final interaction was having all currently available projects for contractors to browse through when they want to look for a job, both in list and map form.
Another example of iterations I made was in the status component. This component is to show landlords the progress on their projects. I started with just a status bar based on time, but I soon realized that in reality, Landlords wouldn't care as much about how the project is faring time-wise, and its a relatively inaccurate form of measurement of status. So instead, I opted to use stages to show status.
LOW-FIDELITY
MID-FIDELITY
HIGH-FIDELITY
My main goal with the design system is to create a simple yet meaningful brand identity. I made sure simplicity was the most important by identifying a couple key colors to hone in on the brand identity without over-complicating the design. I made sure to create styles that the developers can consistently replicate.
Creating a scalable design system in terms of components was also incredibly vital for our development process. Making sure every design aligned with a basic design system was one of my overarching rules when designing.
1. Getting feedback is so important.
After working on the same idea everyday for an extended period of time, it was difficult for me to see beyond my current designs. Asking other designers and users for feedback on my designs helped me open my eyes to inherent flaws in my designs.
2. Less is more.
As a designer, it can be easy to do too much, making it difficult for the user to navigate. During my design process, I realized that having a simple and scalable design system makes it easy both for me as a designer and for my developers. Since we were in a time constraint, keeping it simple was vital.
3. Design is all-encompassing.
I'm someone who usually sticks to my strengths, and within design, I've always thought that that was UI/UX. Doing this project has made me realize that as a designer, I need to be skilled in all facets of design (branding, graphic, product, and more) in order to build a successful product. Design can be and is more than just your individual niche.
And finally, a big thank you to my amazing team, Shane Yokota, Jonathan Pham, Saad El Gharbaoui, and my amazing mentors, Indira Abhyanker, Mitchell Morrison, and Kelcie Fan! I definitely could not have done it without them.
