Company: EasyPro

Industry: Real Estate, SaaS

Role: Lead Product Designer

EasyPro is a company aimed at using technology to solve problems in the real estate space across Africa. SmartVille is a CRUD style process management system that helps real estate and facility management companies better carry out their most problematic processes.

Estate and Facility management in Nigeria has always been a very analog process with inefficient processes that leave residents unsatisfied most of the time. The presence of multiple frameworks of management makes the estate residents always burdened with re-learning processes after a process change is made in response to complaints.

An app for managing and automating estate administrative activities such as maintaining the buildings and estate amenities, admitting visitors into estate premises, checking if there is an issue and even receiving complaints from the residents.

The first step here was ensuring I understood the problem and clarify the requirements just so I’m not making any inaccurate assumptions. Here are some of the keywords that stood out for me in the brief and an initial stakeholder interview. They informed the direction for the project and the implementation approach;

On reading and understanding the brief through clarifying questions with the stakeholders, I was able to gain a preliminary product vision and began brainstorming ideas for what the product should look like. I also went online to look for existing products in the estate management market to get a feel of what the industry entails.

The suite of products caters to 3 user segments; Residents, Management, and security personnel. The majority of the users would access the product on android devices and so the business case for that is solid. However, the need for a native iOS app was denied to to the high cost-benefit ratio.

Hence, a responsive web app for all 3 user segments was decided upon.

The main features are:

Residents:

Pay recurring bills

Raise incidents with the management

Manage visitor access

Create and manage payments

Manage incident tickets

Manage visitor access

Raise and manage incidents

Manage visitor access

Track payments

With the initial brainstorming done, the next step is to come up with a plan for a product that builds competitive advantage and satisfies the primary goal; to facilitate the ease of the application's utilization.

To gain better insights as to how to approach this product’s design, I came up with some research questions for the user interviews. I chose 5 participants at random from each user segment and conducted user interviews with previously prepared questions. These questions are meant to help gather the following data.

Afterwards, I collated and sorted the user responses to be able to properly analyse them and extract the information out of them.

The research confirms some of the hypothesis from the desk research and also provided more insights as to what users want and what our user goals are.

✅ People want certain visitors to have easier access to them than others.

✅ Parents want to retain control of who visits their children

✅ People want payment instructions that are easy to follow.

✅ People want to be able to pay for levies and charges on their phones.

✅ People want to easily report incidents that management should attend to.

After gathering and analysing all the data gathered, I proposed the following solutions which will help address both the concerns of the users and the problems, fears and motives addressed in the user interviews.