Empowering customers to self-manage their real estate investments

Background: Estyvar is a real estate property management firm offering services to property owners who entrust Estyvar with their property to manage lease contracts, tenants, billing, fee and utilities payments, work orders and property tax payment.

Project Brief: Find a way to make clients’ life easier when it comes to dealing with their landlord (for tenants) and their real estate assets (for property owners).

My role as a Design Leader: After gaining approval by the company CEO to implement a design-heavy approach to tackle the challenge the organization was facing, I took on the role of UX Designer and Design Strategist. My team involved everyone in the administrative side of the business as they were the key stakeholders dealing with an ever-growing information communication problem.

My approach was to first involve all parties into the Design Thinking process, teach and empower them to use the design methods I rolled out to contribute ideas and achieve buy-in from them. In doing so, the team started to think differently about the problems facing them and their contributions formed part of the process to achieve results.

My responsibilities:

• Understand the problem facing the company and every individual in the administrative team

• Interview clients on both sides (rental and owners) to understand expectations, frustrations and requirements

• Lead design sprints and design thinking bootcamps

• Develop project scope and milestones for completion

• Prototype potential solutions and test UI flow through wire framing exercises.

• Validate proposed solution with test cohort