Overview

My Pathlight is the 1st in-house property management mobile app in Home Partners of America, a Blackstone subsidiary. The product was initiated by me and a couple of project managers in response to the rising interest rates and dwindling property acquisition growth. Since Q3 2022, this product has been one of the top priorities for the company, and it has continued to contribute to stabilize rent collection rates, reduce service expenses, and increase customer satisfaction.

Key Outcomes from My Pathlight Property Mobile App

🏆 95.7% Mobile app adoption rate
⬆️ 22% Increase in annual rent collection
⬆️ 10 points improvement on brand NPS

How It Started

The Problem

In Q1 2022, facing slowed growth due to rising interest rates, Home Partners of America shifted focus from property acquisition to operational improvement, prompting leadership to collect proposals aligned with this new direction.

Leadership approved our proposal of building an in-house property management mobile app on the condition that we would need to provide quantitative success validation within 3.5 months for the company’s full commitment to product development.

Project 1 : Validating MVP Success in 3.5 Months

Due to the tight timeline, our solution is to design and release an MVP version.

Challenge:

Plan and design realistic yet impactful deliverables


Team: Me + 1 Product Manager + 1 Offshore UI Designer

My Role: Planning + Wireframing + Testing

For planning, I collaborated with the PM. Together we defined the MVP launch scope of the following:

Focus on frequently used features and direct residents outside the app for less common or technically complex features.

• 1400 households, about 5% of the total households at the time, participated in the soft launch, which is an industry-standard.

• According to the Power BI report, the top three most frequently used functions were payment, maintenance tracking, and contact us. For other features, users were directed to the desktop portal to complete their desired actions.

• The design flow and style mirrored those of the existing resident desktop portal.

1 Month Post MVP Release…

Although the MVP fell short of user expectations, we received the green light from leadership for full development due to the high adoption rate of 68%.

We launched the MVP version in Q3 2022 and conducted user interviews and data reviews. We learned the app fell short of user expectations in terms of visual presentation and usability. Despite this, highlights include a decent adoption rate of 68% within just one month of launch.

Enhancement Examples

Conclusion:

Users expect an all-in-one mobile app for all their property management needs.

The concept property management mobile app aligns with residents' expectations and existing behaviors, but falls short due to a lack of functionalities and unintuitive design.

Project 2: Acquire Support from Cross-Functional Teams to Build the All-in-One Platform

To ask for support, we need to first align our knowledge. This means understanding the goals are trying to achieve, challenges we are facing, and actions we can take.

Challenge:

Adjust stakeholders’ concerns and highlight opportunities to contribute to OKRs.

Team: Me + 1 Product Manager

My Role: Workshop Hosting + Benchmark Establishing

Duration: 3 weeks

To do this in the remote work setting, I decided the best way would be to host a collaborative workshop in FigJam. This allowed me to host discussions with the product manager, marketing members, business stakeholders, and the dev team at the same time. Having all these members we can ensure any idea we come up with is feasible, impactful, and contributes to the enterprise goal.

Here are the top 3 pain points and top 3 final solutions we identified: 

😞 Top Pain Points

• Product identity gap

• High vendor subscription costs

• Unstable rent collection

“ You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure. ”

– Peter Drucker

To effectively implement the solutions we identified, I organized a follow-up workshop where we divided our solutions into three phases. We then broke each solution into smaller tasks and assigned team members to each task.

I created a benchmark to ensure every initiative aligns with enterprise goals and yields tangible results; contributing to stabilizing rent collection, decreasing expenses, and increasing customer satisfaction.

After all this prep work, now we are ready to tackle the first solution of revamp app & portal UX/UI

Project 3: Revamp UX/UI

Challenges:

1. Establish a strong product identity, and 

2. Surface the right feature at the right time

Team: Me + 1 Junior Designer

My Role: Planning + Research + Design System Building + Wireframing

Duration: 3 months

Synthesizing method

I walked through each app and marked elements that contribute to a strong product identity creation, then converted findings into design recommendations.

Scalable Design System Building

My contribution includes:

• Planning

• Building out the foundations

• Creating examples for the junior designer to follow

Surfacing the right feature at the right time.

Card Sorting – Ensure information architecture aligns with residents’ expectations

I conducted multiple Hybrid Card Sorting exercises using Userlytics. This involved listing the most frequently visited modules (homepage, payment, profile, repair, my lease, and messages) as main categories and auditing all existing sub-features within each module as cards.

Key takeaways : 

• Residents expect to see shortcuts on frequently used functions on the homepage.

• Residents expect only to see information associated with them under the profile.

• Residents think the profile is secondary information compared to others. 

• Certain features need to be accessible in multiple locations.

Solution

Integrate Hybrid Card Sorting findings to accommodate resident app journey

Example: Homepage adjusts to accommodate different residency statuses

• The move-in to-do list is prioritized during pre-move-in.

• A welcome confetti is displayed on the move-in day.

• Payment and maintenance features are emphasized after move-in.

1 Month After Revamped UX/UI Full Release…

The app's version met overall user expectations, increasing the adoption rate to from 68% to 87.7 %.

However, ease of use is slightly lower, primarily due to the maintenance module. Residents were still directed elsewhere to submit maintenance requests.

The above finding aligned with the teams’ expectation, which led to our next project:

Project 4: In-House Maintenance Intake Creation

Challenge

Configure intuitive experiences for residents, resident service operations, and vendors.

Team: Me + 2 Product Managers + 2 Business Stakeholders

My Role: Roadmapping + User Interview + Wireframing + Prototyping

Duration: 2 months

I first tackle this challenge by initiating conversations with product managers of the resident operation team and vendor team to map out the maintenance intake service mapping :

1. Residents would first go through a questionnaire to submit their requests

2. The Resident Service Operations team would receive the request 

3. Then the RSO team will dispatch the maintenance request to a vendor (due to limitations at the time, they were only able to dispatch to 1 vendor at a time)  

4. The vendor will schedule an appointment based on the availabilities that residents have submitted

From mapping, talking with residents, resident service operation, and vendors. I was able to identified top frustrations of each party:

Solution

Balancing needs among residents, service operations, and vendors.

To balance the needs of the three parties, I initiated more discussions with PMs and proposed several different design solutions. Eventually, we identified:

Therefore, we decided to build out 3 intake channels. These three channels triage residents to different solutions based on the urgency level of their needs

4 Steps For Non-Emergency Request Submission

Step 1 - Location, Category, Type, Problem

Step 3 - Availability

Step 4 - Review, Health & Safety Consent

3 Months After In-House and In-App Maintenance Module Full Release…

Last but not least.

Project 5: Autopay Enhancement + Promotion

Challenge:

Align knowledge & ship deliverables across multiple organizations

Team: Me + 2 Product Managers + 2 Business Stakeholders

My Role: Workshop Hosting + Wireframing + UAT conducting

Duration: 2 months

Weekly alignment & resource optimization workshop

To tackle this challenge, I used Figjam to lay out the autopay adoption rate, platforms hosting user actions, ongoing, in progress, and potential opportunities of autopay-related effort across different departments in correspondence to the resident journey.

This way everyone is aligned and aware of all the moving pieces, to ensure we can optimize resources.

We recognized that the highest adoption rate takes place prior to/during move-in & first month of residency, therefore, we can leverage existing outbound channels during this phase.  

• For the product team, it would be to integrate the in-app/portal autopay promotion pop-up.

• For the operational team, it would be an Autopay introduction during a phone call. 

• For the marketing team, it would be to include autopay information in outbound emails. 

Product Solutions

In-App Promotion

• Targeted Users: Residents who never enrolled in AutoPay and are not under eviction

Result of Autopay Enhancement and Promotion in 3 months:

🎉 Overall Product Success 🎉

All the resident app/portal sub-initiatives under UI Revamp, Payment, and Maintenance met their target goals and contributed to our enterprise's OKRs of stabilizing rent collection, reducing expenses, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Reflection