RPA Mobile
- Communication tool for
- Apartment managers to
- reach their Tenants.
My Role
- Research
- Visuals
- UX / UI
Team
- 2 UX Designers
Resident Connect allows multi-residential property managers to deliver timely messages to their tenants without having to hand-deliver notices, bills, or anything else to each unit. Property owners save both time and money by switching to RConnect.
Improving communication between tenants and property managers at multi-unit apartment complexes.
The idea was to have a paperless system for notices that did not rely on emails due to time-sensitivity and deliverability issues.
We started off by conducting contextual interviews with my own apartment manager before meeting with a few from surrounding properties. In all, we were able to interview five property managers in Ventura, CA.
Extra cost: Printing hundreds of pages, putting them in envelopes, and marking them individually is a time-consuming process. For a mid-sized property of 100 units, a two-page notice can take a significant time for the management to complete.
Manual Labor: Sticking notices at hundreds of apartment doors is a time-consuming task that could take hours and a lot of arrangements if they are individually marked for each unit.
Damaged Doors: Adhesive from the notices damages door paint.
Management not on site: Makes it even
harder to send the notices to the
tenants if it
is a smaller apt complex with no
maintenance staff or manager on
property.
No way for the property manager to
know that if the tenant actually
received
the notice and has taken the required
action on time.
After our initial meeting with
the property managers we wanted to
hear from
the tenants and hear what they how
they felt about the existing system.
Not everyone in the household gets to see it.
Sometimes Tenants are not given enough time to prepare due to short notices.
Tenant stayed away from home the whole day, never get to see the notice.
Removing the notices often leaves marks on their doors.
From our stakeholder interviews, we were able to create personas — fictional users that encapsulate the needs, behaviors, and goals of distinct groups of property managers and tenants. I focused on understanding the needs of our primary personas Susan Benett and John Saunders(poperty managers),which dictated the product requirements for the design.
Initial idea of what the problem is and what the possible solution might be
Parerless - Delivery notices electronically.
No email - Emails are not reliable for conveying time-constrained messages
Low cost - Solution should not be more expensive than the existing paper based method of delivering notices
Text-based notifications will alert the tenant of a water shutdown. The manager of the property can set up and inform hundreds of tenants in less than five minutes, all while saving money on printing and labor costs.
