My Role:
Lead UX and UI designer
Deliverables:
Concepts
UX & UI Design
Prototypes
User Testing
Monitoring
Product Owner
Developers
The Team:
UX Designer
UX Researcher
The Opportunity
Property managers needed a quick and clear way for their residents to book amenities on their own when the pandemic began.
When the pandemic put most in-person interaction in 2020 on pause, residential property managers were thrown for a loop. The early-2020 Zego app did not allow residents to see when amenities were available, make reservations, or view their usage history (for tracking pandemic spread).
Zego had an opportunity to increase value to its customers (the property managers) and their residents.
Amenity Reservations by Zego // 2019
Companies usually earn 140% more from customers who’ve had positive experiences with a business than the ones who had mediocre or negative experiences.
Where to start?
The team and I interviewed property managers and gathered feedback directly from resident users using feedback features within the app itself. We also knew health tracking was important, so we even researched best practices for tracking how a virus spread and what information a user would need to calculate their risk of infection.
At the same time, we knew the residents’ use of the Zego app impacted the most important thing to the residents at that time: their home.
We wanted to promote safety and security through the new features, while preserving their happiness as users and human beings.
How can the residents book on their own without coming to the front desk?
Where do I find out if a space has any availability today?
How can I find out which amenity I used last week for contact tracing?
What can we do to limit the amount of time residents share a space with each other?
How can we let residents know a space is closed for cleaning?
Where do I find out how long I can reserve a space and if I have to share it with others?
Original Concepts
Here's the twist
I lead the UX team in designing the new features the engineers could quickly build and ship. Our objective was to gather user feedback on the features and iterate in subsequent updates.
However, the Product Owner was under pressure from stakeholders and decided to add additional functionality, which would surely delay shipping the update and gathering important feedback.
Hourly reservation type
Add full facility & multi-
day reservation types
Basic amenity details
More complex detail & booking options
View-only history
Edit & cancel options to upcoming reservations
Quite an impact
To measure success in the outcome of the design, I created a HEART plan (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success) to compare metrics from before and after the feature was released.
We significantly increased the key metrics of satisfaction and monthly active users. Based on all of the factors we created a comprehensive UX score that we can watch with future releases.
What's next?
I worked closely with the Product Owner to propose and defend UX decisions to create the best version of the Amenity Reservation feature for residents. I was in constant communication with developers to ensure my decisions could be implemented and that I was designing a product that could be built within the project scope.
While a lot of work is going into the property management side of the feature, I see more in the future for the resident app.
- Add "My Reservation" to the availability screen so a resident knows which of the reservations shown is theirs.
- Add the ability to edit a reservation without having to delete and rebook.
- Add a way for residents to report a no-show when a space is booked but no one is physically using the space.
I learned to be flexible and roll with what gets thrown into the project along the way. But not without continuing to critically think about what impact that has on the resident's experience.
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