Community issue reporting
Design Exercise
“A great residential community (e.g. condominium, college dormitory, etc.) provides a variety of amenities and a dedicated staff responsible for its maintenance. But there isn’t always an easy way for community members to report problems to management so they can be resolved quickly.
Design a system for a community of your choice, so members can report issues and track their resolutions. Show your process and how you arrived at your solution. Please include a sequence of high-fidelity mocks from your design solution.”
I was really excited to work on something outside of my daily routine. I chose designing for community issue reporting as lack of a system like this is something, I have experienced first-hand. This is real problem and I’m glad I spent time to try and solve this.
Design Process
This process details out how the design function operates for the purpose of delivering high-quality designs and directly influence the product experience I deliver to customers.
It is intended to specify WHAT needs to be accomplished at each phase of the process along key roles and responsibilities. It suggests activities for HOW to do things, but it is not prescriptive.
Discover
During this phase, complete focus was on understanding the user’s goals, motivation and needs. I wanted to learn about users and gather insights about their end to end experience–what are their goals, needs and problems to solve? Identifying what will make the solutions I deliver successful.
For this particular exercise I started by conducting user interviews. I interviewed 3 tenants in my residential community to get an idea about user pain points. I wanted to first validate whether there is a user need for creating an issue reporting system.
COMMUNITY NAME: Emerald Ridge, Bellevue, WA (this community currently does not have issue reporting system)
Interview Questions for Tenants
Background:
1. Age?
2. How long have you lived in this community?
3. What is the size of your apartment?
4. How many cars do you have?
5. Was your apartment upgraded before you moved in?
Identify if users need an issue reporting system:
6. What is your monthly rent range?
7. Based on your understanding of the area, how would you rate your rent amount?
8. Based on how you rated your rent, what are some of the amenities/services you would like to be different or provided by your community?
9. Can you rate the amenities you mentioned above on a scale of 1 to 5? 1 being “nice to have” and 5 being “Absolutely needed”.
Questions about issue reporting service mentioned by user:
10. You rated the need for an issue reporting system as _, could you explain why you rated it that way?
11. How do you currently report issues?
12. How would you rate that experience on a scale of 1 to 5? 1 being Terrible and 5 being Amazing.
13. If your community were to build a system around reporting issues, what would you want from it?
14. Can you rate the features you mentioned above on a scale of 1 to 5? 1 being “nice to have” and 5 being “Absolutely needed”.
15, What would be your device preference to access this system?
Click here to view interview responses.
Key Insights
Background
Most important needs
Major pain points
Once these key insights were obtained from the end user side, I wanted to make sure these are valid from the management side as well. To verify, I conducted an interview with a leasing office manager. This interview was also intended to identify pain points from the management side as well.
Interview Questions for manager
1. How long have you worked as a manager?
2. How do you currently receive requests from tenants?
3. How would you rate that experience from you side?
4. In your opinion is there a better way to receive requests?
5. How do you currently track your tenant’s request?
6. How would you rate that experience?
7. In your opinion is there a better way to receive requests?
8. How do you currently receive payments for rent and utilities?
9. How would you rate that experience?
10. In your opinion is there a better way to receive payments?
11. How do you currently receive and inform tenants about packages?
12. How would you rate that experience?
13. In your opinion is there a better way to notify tenants about their packages?
14. What would be your preferred platform to interact with this portal?
Define
In this phase I identified the biggest opportunities for success as they relate to user goals. Decided which problems I solve at this point, how I measure success and how high the bar is.
Based on the user interviews and insights I defined 2 personas. First for a tenant and the second for a leasing office manager. I was important to look at this issue from both the consumer side and the platform side in order for the solution to be effective.
UX Opportunities
Service request submission / issue reporting
Service request / issue tracking
Billing integration / billing issues
Package notifications / issues
Personas
Problem Hypothesis
What is the primary problem that users face in achieving their goals?
Angie, the tenant
Tenants currently have no way to efficiently report problems/issues about their apartment or the community.
Tenants currently have no way to efficiently track problem/issue resolutions about their apartment or the community.
Tenants currently do not have a centralized system for issue reporting, billing, package delivery.
Lisa, the manager
Managers currently have no way to look at all the service requests they have received in one place.
Managers are unable to communicate the effectively about tenant issue resolutions.
Managers are unable to efficiently notify tenants about packages received.
In which context do these users encounter this problem?
Angie, the tenant
Tenants face this issue in when they need to report problems to the community management.
Lisa, the manager
Managers face these issues as part of their day to day work.
Concept
Based on the UX opportunities defined in Phase 2, I began to explore solutions. It was important to seek feedback and validate the concepts with users to identify which parts of the solution are resonating the most and which are detracting from success. Continued to ideate in low fidelity until I was confident to move forward to Phase 4.
Key Features (prioritized)
Request Submission:
Ability to categorize issues
Provide available times
Provide permission to enter
Mobile version
Request Tracking
Date & time for arrival
Expected completion date
Progress notifications
Billing Integration
Integrate with existing portal
Billing amount info
Due dates
Links to existing portal
Contact manager for billing issues
Package Info
Receive package notifications
Receive package info
Report missing packages
Key Features (prioritized)
Request Submission:
Receive issue notifications
Prioritize work orders
View request queue
Assign work to the crew
Home details
Request Tracking
Notify tenant of service progress
Expected completion date
Progress notifications
Billing Integration
View over-due payments
Notify tenants about over-due payments
Package Info
Enter received packages into the system
Notify tenants about packages
Solution Hypothesis
Which solution could solve this problem?
Creating a one stop system for tenants to report and track issues related to maintenance, billing and package services.
Creating a one stop system for managers to view and work on issues related to maintenance, billing and package services.
What are the benefits that will persuade the user to use this solution?
Currently the tenants have to either visit or call the leasing center to report an issue and there is no way of tracking the progress of work. This system will provide them a way to perform all of these actions using a mobile device.
Currently there is no way for residence manager to view and prioritize the issues reported by the tenants. This system will allow them to view, categorize, prioritize and assign issues to correct person.
How will they discover this solution?
Tenants will be notified by email about this system. They will be asked to create an account.
How will we measure the success of this solution?
Adoption.
Qualitative feedback.
Reduced calls and visits to the leasing center.
Low-Fidelity Sketches
Based on user interview I decided to focus on mobile for Angie (the tenant) and on desktop for Lisa (the manager)
Design
Now that I’ve explored concepts, aligned with the user on how to move forward, and have a design brief in hand, I can begin to execute on the detailed designs for the solution.
USer Flow
Wireframes (angie)
Login screens
It was important to keep Angie’s login experience as painless as possible. As, the community office already have tenant’s data, it would just require Angie to type in her email address for the system to identify who she is in the database.
Primary Navigation
Primary navigation consists of 3 things that were identified in the concepting phase. The pages were designed to provide Angie a snapshot all of the important things. She can swipe to go through snapshots for requests, billing and package. It there is some new activity, she would see a notification on the nav.
Requests
This is probably the most important portion of the UI where I address Angie’s biggest pain point. She can add a new request on the first page or when she taps on the summary to drill down further. Requests have been divided into active, resolved and cancelled. She can click on a case and look at details about that case.
New Request
Based on the user interviews I came up with 2 ways to add a request.
If Angie chose the Detailed option, she would go through a simple process of providing all the information related to the request. She would interact with 5 screens to easily tap and provide the information management needs to fulfill the request. These screens include defining location, service type, specific issue and permission to enter. If she decided not to provide permission to enter, she would have an option to input preferable date and time.
If Angie chose the Describe & Submit option, she would go straight to a screen that would have a text box for her to type in the request and then tap Submit.
Billing
The second most important aspect that came out of the initial research was integrating billing into the issue reporting system. Angie wants to have single place where she can go for all things related to the community.
When Angie taps on the billing summary, she can view her monthly rent, utilities and due dates. Since the users already have online accounts to rent and utility payment services, tapping pay would simply take them to the bill payment page of that service.
Angie can also report any issues related to her billing by a tap on BILLING ISSUE. This would take her to a screen where she would describe her issue and submit.
Packages
The final important aspect that needed to be addressed was packages. Angie wanted a system where she would be automatically notified if she received a big package that has been delivered to the leasing office.
Angie can report a missing package if the postal service says it was delivered but she didn’t receive a notification from the community.
Wireframes (Lisa)
Dashboard
Dashboard
It was important to create a dashboard for Lisa to get a snapshot of all the requests she has received, given her duties as a manager.
On this dashboard she can view service requests, rent and utility overdue payments and reports of any missing packages.
Requests
Once Lisa click View All requests, she can view what types of services are being requested the most. This would help her hire service crew as needed and also assign work orders to them more efficiently.
Issue List
Lisa can view details of all the requests for a particular service type. She can view the case number, unit number and the date received on these requests. She can also view the severity level marked by the tenants, which would help her prioritize the accordingly.
Case Details
When Lisa clicks into a case, she can view all the details related to the issue. This provides her information about issue severity, description, unit number, location of issue, service type and permissions.
At this point Lisa would contact her service crew and assign this issue to them. Once she has done that, she can move the progress bas to “Assign”, which would notify the tenant that their issue has been assigned to a crew member.
Visual Design (Angie)
Visual Design (Lisa)
INTEGRATE
This is the last phase in my design process, where I work to bring the design to life. I collaborate with engineering to turn designs into a working product. The goal is to maintain the design intent and integrity through the implementation as much as possible.
Future steps
Firstly, I would like to spend more time in identifying what other roles would be at play and how I can integrate them into the system to really make it cohesive. I would like to interview the service crew to help achieve their goals. I would also like to create a community board where tenants, managers and service crew can come together to discuss issues.
Once the system is at a pointy where it could cater to all roles, I would like to flush out the visual design for all possible and get an early round of feedback from the users I interview. I would make changes based on their feedback and create a high-fidelity design prototype. After that I would a usability test on the product to identify if the users are able to work through the app with easy and verify if it helps them in achieving their goals.
Things I learned
Designing for system that has multiple roles involved is challenging.
It’s critical to deeply understand needs and goal of all the user types involved.
It’s important to understand what the business needs are and what trade-offs you need to make in order to implement a solution.