Tuesday Properties UX Design Case
Tuesday Properties operates a string of mid-rise apartment complexes in the greater New York City and Washington DC areas. I was hired by Tuesday properties to design a next generation mobile app for their tenants to streamline operations, upsell tenants, and reduce tenant turnover.
The project was initialized through a Design Sprint, answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing those ideas with customers.
Assumptions
- Users will see Bill Pay as the primary reason to use the app and the most valuable feature.
- The app will also serve as the primary (or only) mechanism for requesting maintenance and repairs for rental units.
- Users will most likely be reliant on this app, and will also find that traditional alternatives to paying bills and requesting maintenance are slower and more cumbersome.
- Management companies and landlords do not care as much about the Bill Pay feature and find that collecting consolidated rent payments through an app interface is only marginally more useful than a web portal or mailed-in checks, and more importantly, the benefit does not justify typical SaaS costs
- The critical value add of the app is the ability to advertise and monetize other services that tenant would typically not think of or interact with:
- Laundry services
- Dog walking
- Food/Grocery delivery
- Babysitting
- Community space rental
- Community events
Strategy
Because users will be highly motivated to use the app and will likely not have an alternative to the app, management companies and landlords will see a large opportunity to market and sell other services to a captive audience. The design strategy for the app should be built around emphasizing those secondary and tertiary tenant services while also reducing the number of pain points in paying bills. If users enjoy using the app to pay their bills, they’ll be more likely to consider other services the community may offer.
Solution
Based on the outlined assumptions above, I began with creating user flows for critical parts of the app. I started with onboarding then moved on to Bill Pay.
I followed that with quick sketches, which I turned into high fidelity wireframes. I elected to go with higher fidelity wireframes than I normally would because I wanted to ensure I had enough screen real estate to capture everything I had envisioned for the app. Specifically, the home screen required a significant amount of attention because it was important that I create a usable and accessible bill-pay experience while also meeting the key business objective of upselling tenants with ancillary services.
Following that, I started adding in color, graphics, branding and so on.
Home Screen
The home screen was designed to showcase to the user the various paid services available to their community while also keeping the bill pay option in view and relatively obvious. The top banner indicates to the user how much they owe, and tapping will take them to the payment view. Additionally, the bill pay option in the tab bar at the bottom is centered, pointing the user to the key functionality of the app that they’re looking for.
Services
The Services screen is likely the second most important screen in the app. This space is an opportunity to sell the users on the many paid services available to them in their community. Laundry, grocery delivery, dog walking, etc. — these are not essential services, so it’s critical to package them as nicely and visibly as possible.
Next Steps
There are still many screens that need to be built out and iterated on, but there is currently enough to work with to build a prototype and get it in front of users to test the assumptions the designs were built on.
