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Hollyburn Resident Portal Case Study

 

Designed a residential portal to help Hollyburn streamline and manage all their residential rental properties across Canada. The goal was to give renters a “one stop shop” for to support signing up for pre-authorized rental payments, uploading their yearly home insurance paperwork, reporting maintenance issues in their suite and around the property, load laundry cards, get receive all building notifications and always have access to a copy of their rental agreement. The goal for Hollyburn Properties was to digitize their paper heavy systems, keep residents better informed, and streamline the overall building management process.

I started this project with a stakeholder survey to get to know them, understand their business need, and what they might know about their users, plus the trials and tribulations of running a rental company. After receiving the survey results, and realizing that Hollyburn knew a lot about how their buildings are managed, and their goals for the project form from a management perspective, I quickly realized they didn’t actually know a lot about their users, and if the users would actually want to interact with such a platform.
Hollyburn was happy to have us conduct a user survey to try and learn as much as we could quickly and efficiently. Armed with what I knew from the client about the current systems, and how the buildings are managed, I devised a survey to try and gather information that would see if these two user groups might have some common ground.
 

The good news was people were motivated to take the process’ like maintenance requests online, and that preauthorized payments were already in the majority of how people made rental payments. There were some outliers who didn’t own a home computer or a smartphone, but they mentioned using library computers and saw a benefit to moving online as long as some things were still manageable in person.

Armed with this information, and the information gathered from the stakeholders about their pain points and needs, I was able to develop empathy maps that lead to personals that captured the alignment between the renters and the rental managers.

They could both agree that building communications worked fine over all as they currently were, and that they all liked talking to each other. They also agreed that having a more concise way to to post building notifications, and get information could be simplified, and all those paper postings were wasteful.

Agreeing on simplifying and automating rental payments was easy. Both wanted to have a very clear picture of what was being paid, when, and if a payment had been missed or failed. People who ran small businesses in their homes laso liked the idea of rental receipts.

The building managers all felt that they had lots of maintenance requests to manage, the renters on the other hand really didn’t feel like they had to manage much. Both sides agreed that keeping informed on what was happeing to a maintenance request once it had been made would be helpful, as slips of paper could go missing, or be missed, and frustration would ensue.

Planning for the wireframes for me meant grouping what we knew we needed, with some nice to have items that came up in the surveys to develop a skeleton of what would be created.

I grouped all the major recurring patterns, then divided them into categories that made sense together, like “Payments”. This contained all the rental payment information, rent receipts, and the ability to change banking information, all the while meeting legal requirements, and providing a method to stop payments.

 

After this planning came the wireframing stage, breaking down the pages into
A home dashboard: that lets the user get a quick overview of what is going on such as:

  • If there are any warnings, like expiring home insurance documents
  • Any new building notifications
  • When your next rental payment is due
  • The success and rental receipt for the last rental payment
  • A quick link to make a maintenance request
  • Display any open maintenance requests
  • The ability to load a laundry cash card

 

 

Payments screen: Taking the guesswork out of pre-authorized payments

  • What bank and branch name the user was currently using for their pre-authorized payments, as a means to verify that they are using the most current bank
  • A breakdown of the types of payments that made up the amount the user had agreed to pay monthly
  • Quick access chat, to display the previous payment status (success or failure) and the ability to download a rental receipt PDF

 

 

Maintenance screen: Making and tracking requests

  • Resident manager information for following up on your maintenance request if the situation had changed, or the user had questions for the rental manager
  • The ability to make a new maintenance request (with the back-end mandate that the user could only have 3 open/active maintenance requests at a time to limit the amount of frivolous requests being made by renters with extravagant ideas)
  • An accordion showing any open requests as well as closed/past requests as a record to both the renter and the rental manager
  • In the open accordion, the maintenance request shows not only the information requested on the form that the user fills out to enter the request (a child page of this page) but also a progress bar so the renter can see that the rental manager is actively working on resolving the request.

 

 

 

Property screen: All your buildings’ important info in one place

  • Always know your address when filling out forms or sending mail
  • Have one place to find your resident manager’s contact information
  • Upload your laundry card to allow use of the Laundry facilities
  • Know what work is being done in the building to keep you safe

 

 

 

Profile screen: Designed to house all the users’ information

  • Update passwords and usernames as necessary
  • Keep your home insurance up to date to meet the requirements of your lease
  • Always have access to your lease
  • Refer a friend to any Hollyburn building

 

 

 

I presented these wireframes in an Invision prototype to the client along with the motivational and research findings that made these design choices possible. A mix of Hollyburn’s needs were matched with their renters’ desires, then also with simple additions like stop payments, and clarity around building notifications to make sure we were adhering to Rental Tenancy Acts’ across the country. This made the client happy to see that the design decisions made were based in research and a deep understanding of their business.

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