Re-Imagining the Home
Rental Application
Challenging outdated property management approaches to applying for a rental home.
Demonstrated Competencies:
Product Strategy, Research & Discovery, UX and Visual Design
Year Completed:
2018
Goals:
- Improve Application-to-Lease conversion from 50% to 60%
- Reduce Cancellations in the Application Screening process from 30% to 15%
- Reduce Denials in the Application Screening process from 24% to 20%
- Reduce Time-to-Screen an Application from 1.4 days to 1.1 days
Objective
Re-design the resident application experience to improve resident conversion and reduce application processing time.
Key Insights
- ~90% of applications stall because of incomplete ID and Proof of Income (POI) documentation
- ~30-50% of applications canceled required documents not returned within 48 hours
- While screening and Google Analytics data is extremely limited, anecdotal research suggests that a fair amount of denials are due to poorly communicated app criteria
Critical Problems to Solve
The user experience in the resident application flow is confusing and does not fully communicate nor request everything that is required in the screening process (Target User: Resident Prospects)
- Application requirements and POI documentation needs aren’t clearly communicated nor is the user prompted for the correct documentation
- Primary applicants must have co-applicant information on-hand before an application can be completed
- Notifications are poorly worded and do not communicate required steps to the user
- Application progress is not effectively or efficiently shared amongst all leaseholder applicants; users aren’t sure how long they have in left in the application process
- Language is generally confusing, unclear, and lacks a friendly, encouraging tone
- The entire experience is not mobile-friendly
Inefficient, manual processes create screening delays which increases cancellation risk (Target User: Screening Coordinators & Property Management Field Teams)
- The system isn’t geared to support the complexity of our ID and POI documentation requirements
- Gross Monthly Income for an applicant is calculated manually in an Excel sheet, adding processing time to each application submitted
- There's double data entry between two critical internal systems when importing key screening data and in communicating the status of an application with key field staff
- It's not possible for applicants to view / modify their applications or upload additional documents post-submission
Project Approach
Let me start by saying that Residential Technology or ResTech is a hidden disruption gem within software. Outside of consumer products and services, few technology companies are playing in the space, let alone developing scalable, enterprise-grade solutions that truly deliver outcomes with an enjoyable user experience. While there are several titans in the industry, I’ve found the products to be incredibly confusing and inefficient at doing just about any critical workflow within Single Family Rentals. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the application process for leasing a rental home.
In starting this project, I came to a refreshed appreciation for conducting discovery with customers and users to understand them better than they understand themselves. While I am completely used to customers coming to the table with solutions instead of problems, I was a little surprised to see internal employees advocate so heavily for solutions without a true understanding of what they were trying to accomplish. Additionally, because a lot my target users follow repeatable processes as a part of their daily work, I was surprised to see how many were unaware of the inefficiencies that existed in their own daily use of technology. This realization required a lot of “follow-me-homes” to be conducted to observe users in their real environment in order to understand the market and organizational problems to solve.
Once the above goals and problems were identified, I spent some quality time understanding the direct and indirect competitive landscape to identify solutions that could deliver the most simplistic user experience. When it comes to the best-in-breed elements of an application experience there’s a lot to be learned from players like Rocket Mortgage, edgier Insurance companies, and rapidly evolving PaaS offerings. I spent the next two months designing a mini-design system with a modern, refreshed visual design and a responsive, mobile-first web experience that was heads-and-shoulders above anything that existed amongst the cornerstone companies in ResTech.
Breaking the design into stories was an immense task though. The proprietary systems I work on are essentially multi-sided networks where prospect web applications, internal custom software, off-the-shelf solutions, and third party integrations all come together to facilitate workflows for 5 different target users. Implementing the service design toolkit was essential to keeping track of all of this complexity. This also was a job for intense story mapping exercises and all-day story writing sessions. At the end we logged over 120 stories that were split into 10 different epics to facilitate “chunking” and delivery of incremental value.
Final presentation back to business stakeholders was a home-run. We walked the team through the business case, goals, key insights, problems to solve, and a functioning prototype built using Figma and Marvel to demonstrate the prospect application experience. Development on this project is scheduled for H2’18 and eagerly awaiting real user testing and feedback.
