App Design / Research / Design System / 2019
Lightly
Creating a seamless interaction between landlords and tenants.
/ Overview
Lightly aimed to integrate all the payments, reducing time and effort taken, minimizing interactions both tenants and landlords have to make to manage rental, property and utilities related payments, making crystal clear what’s to be paid and when with easy and fast solutions to pay and track utilities.
/ My role
Market & User Research, Experience & Strategy Design (UX Planning, Wireframes, Prototyping, Personas, Journey Maps), Validation & Usability Testing, Visual Identity & UI Design
Background
I joined the project right after the Stakeholders build their MVP with main features that would allow basic needs fulfillment like roughly creating a property and linking utilities. They went through technical validation of their concepts and once they were convinced they can move forward they asked me to join the team to validate the product with users, refine the experience and build a visual identity.
I was the sole Designer building the product.
Implemented a design process.
Helped stakeholders to understand user-centered design.
- Rebuilt the app from scratch.
Improved usability.
- Built Lightly's visual identity and online presence.
Put in place a Design System Manager.
Lightly offers an easy way for Landlords and Tenants to manage their rental payments. All in one app creating a seamless experience.
The Process
The proposed process was quickly understood and appreciated by Stakeholders. We decided to dig deeper into their assumptions and come with research data based on real and valuable insights gathered from both qualitative and quantitative research. And only then we moved further on making design decisions.
We wanted to understand how people rent, live, and how they pay their rent and utilities.
Landlords in our target audience are split into two categories.
1. Landlords that have between 1 and 3 properties to rent and don’t live exclusively from collecting rent and have a day job. They want to reduce the time they involve managing their rentals quickly and easily. Avoiding any overdue or missed payments.
2. Landlords that have over 3 properties to rent and live exclusively from collecting rent and usually have rental businesses to manage.
Understanding the problems
Our research unveiled frustrations of both tenants and landlords when it comes to rental payments and collaboration management.
- Landlords involve too much time in managing rentals. From collecting rent to making sure there are no overdue for both rent and utilities, landlords split their attention.
- Worry about properties management and assure everything is alright when it comes to their properties.
- Unaware of overdue and hard communication with their tenants.
- Get all the utility payments and calculate all the expenses.
Express understanding using personas.
To develop the product we built personas, one for the tenant and one for the landlord to base our decision on them in the design process for purposefully outcomes and design solutions.
For two weeks I interviewed 5 tenants and 3 landlords and built 2 personas for which I defined their goals and pain point and mapped their experienced in managing rental payment with customer journey maps.
In the interviews with both tenants and landlords, we discovered 4 scenarios of managing rental-related payments.
The tenant is making one monthly payment to the landlord including rent and utilities. While this is easy for the tenant, the landlord is involving time to calculate all the expenses. Landlords prefer this approach to be sure there is no overdue for utilities. Sometimes tenants are questioning the amount for utilities to be paid.
The tenant is making one payment to the landlord that is only the rent and he has to pay all the utilities by himself. This approach is requesting more time involved for the tenant and makes landlords unsure of the status of payments.
Tenant and Landlord have split utility payments. A more rare approach is when some payments are paid by tenants, some are paid by the landlord. One reason this is happing is tenants’ subscriptions.
Tenants are living for free in an apartment (usually the property of a family member) and the owner wants to know utilities are paid.
Use Cases
We built a total of 6 use cases that we were able to overlap to offer a simple experience while fulfilling users’ goals.
We defined that there will be 2 scenarios for connecting users in the app. Either Landlord is using the app and is inviting a tenant to connect to his property. Either Tenant is discovering the app or used it in previous rentals and will invite the Landlord to setup his property. In both scenarios, we kept the steps at a minimum.
- For Setting up a property we decided to split the process into chunks of completion so Landlords don’t feel overwhelmed.
- Making use of recurrent’s use steps is reduced as much as possible.
- Made sure all the complementary features like notifications, chat, history, paid subscription, setting up the next tenant are integrated.
To have a clear focus when making decisions in easing the collaboration between tenants and landlords we defined some principle to orbit around
Then we quickly did wireframes and soon moved to rapid prototyping. We iterated fast keeping landlords and tenants always in the loop for feedback.
Iterating the Overview to offer insights at a glance and get a better understanding of what’s to be paid.
/ FOR LANDLORDS
We focused on Timesaving and Reliability. Reducing landlords’ recurrent’s steps as much as possible and offer a quick solution to act in case of overdue payments. So we created a task flow to understand things to be done and then we iterated design solutions.
/ FOR TENANTS
For tenants they had to knew how much they have to pay each month and what is the deadline, everything split by type of payment. Offering an easy and quick solution to pay.
We focused on Unity and Transparency.
Release the expenses anxiety. Connection and Unity with organized payments.
/ PAIN POINT 1
Tenants or Landlords have to go monthly though all the utility payments and calculate the sum including the rent to make payment and be sure they both are even.
In lightly Landlords can easily see how much they have to receive from the tenants, what utilities they have to pay, and what utilities tenants have to pay.
/ PAIN POINT 2
Tenants & Landlords lack a quick overview at any point in time.
Not anymore. They see how much they have to pay from just a glance. Tenants just see the total sum they have to pay monthly and detailed split by what’s to be paid to the landlord and what’s to be paid to utilities.
/ PAIN POINT 3
Going to each utility provider and make the payments is time-consuming. The process that some people optimized more than others.
We created One-Click payments.
/ PAIN POINT 4
Landlords are unaware of the status of utility payments.
Even if the tenant is paying the utilities, the landlord can see the status of the invoices.
Connecting Landlord & Tenant Scenario
Landlord invites Tenants to a property when the Contract is created.
- Tenants only have to accept the invitation received, go through contract details to be sure everything is as discussed with the landlord, and once accepted they can see the payments to be made and detailed information about each month.
Completeness satisfaction with the split property setup process.
Split the property setup process into steps to offer completeness satisfaction.
Landlords have to go through a detailed process of setting up the property, adding utility accounts, defining the contract details, and invite the tenant. To make this process feel productive and timeless we decided to split the completeness into a few steps.
Design System Manager
I built a simple Design System Manager for a clear understanding of elements by Developers and to enable flawless scalability in the future.
Website
Admin Dashboard
Lightly also needed an Admin Dashboard to manage its users.
We were able to create and validate a design solution that is making clear for tenants and landlords of the payments.
Because of the strong feedback from users we iterated and achieved an initial release that is fulfilling main pain points identified in the Discovery Phase.
- After splitting the process into multiple steps made users feel completeness at each stage of the process.
- Landlords said they have a clear image over the payments.
- Tenants said they are pleased with the full integration.
I'm open to be a Dedicated User Experience Research Partner //
adrian sion / 2023
Bucharest, Romania
Phone: +40 755 883 825
Email: [email protected]