Inbox Concept

Inbox Snapshot

UX Improvement

Jun 2021 – Oct 2021

The Client
Simplifyy is an integrated property management solution helping teams manage and maintain their residents, prospects, and vendors in one comprehensive software system.

The Problem
As team members were talking to individuals in the inbox, it became apparent that more information needed to be available to view at a moment's notice.

The Objective
To reduce response times, and increase resident satisfaction, a new panel was needed to supply team members with common information on the individual they were talking to.

Conduction User Interviews

The first item at hand was to conduct user interviews to understand the problems current team members were facing. I wanted to discuss and define areas of the application that needed improvements and additions surrounding the inbox.

Sample of Questions

1. How frustrating is the software to use as is?
2. What are some top items that you need to pull when you are speaking with someone?
3. Is there any additional information not available in the current system that would help your workflow?
4. Are there any current workflows that don't make sense to you or are awkward to navigate?

The Findings

Insight #1: Generally, when a user was conversing in the inbox, it would become automatic for them to pull up the individual's profile in a different window, forcing them to switch between the two.

Insight #2: Users are broken up into different teams that handle different parts of the communication process. Between the resident and leasing teams, a team member may only need to focus on one aspect of a profile versus everything at once.

Insight #3: Repeated items that users mentioned wanting to be able to see were general resident information including maintenance requests, lease details, and ledgers. As well as information about the location of the residents or prospects were at.

Prioritizing Requests

As part of the interview process, I maintained a spreadsheet of repeated feature requests, their priority, and the UX effort for each. I based the UX effort on the approximate number of days I thought it would take to complete before handing off the designs to the development team.

Goals

After going through interviews with the users, two items needed to be addressed. Allow the information to be viewed in the same window, and separate key information for the different teams. Using a tabular navigation bar helps my design choices thereafter.

Iterating on a Solution

As I started to detail my designs for the new solution, the plan was to have a pop-up window that the users could open to gather a more detailed view of the individual's details. This didn't solve the initial problem of saving time. The information was more present, but users would still need to open the pop-up modal, find the key information, close the modal, and then respond. This solution lends better to a call-dependent workflow and not text.

Iteration two introduced a reduced left navigation to allow for a new static panel to be present when a conversation was selected.

The Details

The panel houses information on the individual, their documents, location details, any current or past maintenance requests, open or closed task list items, and general notes that admins might leave for their account.

Validation

To quantitatively review the usability assumptions, I used maze.co to build a testing prototype to confirm the design decisions I made.

From their reporting, which measures miss-click rate, average duration, success rate, and more, I was able to make necessary changes before handing the designs off to the development team.

I saw an increased overall direct success rate from an average of 55% to 75.6% across the two iterations.

In Conclusion

Since the implementation of the new snapshot panel, the number of repeated feature requests dropped from our communication channel. Messages and calls addressing questions about a property or individual dropped on Slack or Google Hangouts between team members. Additionally, I received messages from users about the ease of use and the amount of time being saved by having more control over the information being present.