Scaling property management for VendorPM
Property managers spend $395B on vendors each year and still rely on word of mouth and spreadsheet.
VendorPM is a SaaS tool for enterprise property management companies to centralize data and operations by connecting them with over 15,000 vendors in North America. As a Product Design Intern, I worked on a number of different features on VendorPM's company site and browser application through conducting user interviews and usability tests with company clients and stakeholders.
Over the span of 4 weeks, one of the projects that I took on as part of VendorPM's Product Design team was the rebuilding of the Properties page.
I led the design of the Properties page through collaboration with various stakeholders in the organization including my Design Lead, Product Manager, the Sales team and the Customer Success team which helped me in identifying key pain points, collecting research and feedback, and building wireframes and prototypes.
TIMELINE
May 2021
what did i do?
User Interviews
User Research
Wireframing
Prototyping
Role
Product Design Intern
status
Shipped Q3 2021 🚀
What is the properties page?
The Properties page allows Property Managers to keep track and view all of the current buildings they currently manage. It also allows Property Managers to add new properties and add other Property Managers to an existing property.
VendorPM’s current Properties page
The problem
With the increase of Property Managers being onboarded to the platform, we found that the Properties page was not being utilized to its full potential. According to the Customer Success team, this page was rarely used unless Property Managers needed to add a new property.
How can we make the Properties page more useful for both Property Managers and Vendors to manage property data?
With this question and our two key problems in mind, I was able to conduct a number of interviews with our Customer Success team and Vendor Sales team and and ask them a few questions. More specifically:
Through product Interviews, I was also able to gain a number of insights directly from company clients themselves.
Findings
With a a majority of the demographic being Property Managers, our goal was to collect property data from said group as frictionless as possible and display this information so that
Problem #1
On the Property Managers' side, we found the current Properties page to be limited, in which property information was not fully displayed and attached with their respective property (i.e. existing Quote Requests, previous services).
We also found that despite the ability to add collaborators to existing properties, Property Managers could not add other collaborators to existing properties through this page which resulted in an increase of tickets for the Customer Success team.
Problem #2
Typically, when a Vendor receives a quote request, they require additional property information in order to provide an accurate quote for the service they are providing.
We found a problem on the Vendors' side in which they lacked property information when receiving a quote request from a Property Manager. This often led to Vendors having to reach out to Property Managers outside of our platform or scheduling a site viewing to develop a better understanding of the property.
Ideation
With these goals in mind and the data I had collected from various stakeholders and company clients, I then sketched out a few low-fidelity wireframes in order to visualize how I would apply these concepts to the Properties page.
Explorations
Redesigning the current Properties page
As stated before, one of the main limitations of this page is that it did not display enough information about each property and was relatively limited in what a Property Manager could and could not do.
Above are two different iterations of the redesigned Properties page. With the updated list view, we explored a new and revamped look through the display of more information — including previous and upcoming services corresponding to their respective buildings. A limitation of this page, however, was that there appeared to be a lot of white space for Property Managers who did not have more than one building linked to their account.
On the other hand, we explored a map view in which all the properties would be displayed on a linked map. While this version does display relevant information, there was a lot of visual weight surrounding the map and we found that the map could tend to get crowded as more properties were added.
Creating a Properties extension page
The second exploration was identifying how to display the information that would appear when a Property Manager clicks on their respective property. Here, we explored two different versions in which one version collapsed each piece of information under a different tab, while the other displayed all the information under one view.
In this case, we decided to go with the latter option. Given the demographic of the majority of Property Managers, the Customer Success team had noted that most Property Managers did not need a detailed system to track information at their property. Rather, this information would be more useful for the vendors they were working with. Here, it was important to make this page as concise as possible while also providing Property Managers with the option to manage and keep track of necessary information.
Modifying the current quote request flow to collect property data
Oftentimes when designing for the Property Manager user group, it's important to not overcomplicate forms and to make it easy to fill out as possible. One challenge that I faced with the Properties page was figuring out how to collect the required property information and where to include these points of data collection in the existing VendorPM user flows.
One area of modification was the case in which a Property Manager would send out a Quote Request to several different vendors. In the case that a Property Manager only needs servicing for one of their properties, we decided to include an extra field which asks for the relevant property information. In this case, I made two iterations: (1) a one page checkout, in which the property information fields were just added to the existing Quote Request form and (2) a multi-step checkout, which broke the checkout process into two pages with property information on the second page.
FINAL DESIGNS
After several discussions with my Design Lead, Product Manager and the developers, I finished polishing and refining the small details of each wireframe in Figma for final hand-off.
REFLECTION
Wrapping up my first design internship, I was able to learn a lot about VendorPM and their Product Team, the business-to-business space, and enterprise UX in general. In four months, I was given the opportunity to: