UhomesPro: improve features of property management platform

In this internship, I designed 5+ product features that lead to 5% increase in Monthly Active Users of the UhomesPro platform, a property management tool for student accommodation providers.

Background

Uhomes is a platform where students can easily search for and book accommodations in major cities including London, New York, and Hong Kong. Uhomes Pro, on the other end, is designed for PBSA (Purpose-Built Student Accommodation) providers. It offers tools and data insights to help property managers and landlords efficiently manage their listings, connect with potential renters, and make informed market decisions.

Timeline: July 2024 - September 2024

Project Type: Internship project. The features are launched between Aug - Oct 2024
The team: Product Manager (1), Front end dev (2), Back end dev (2), Visual designer (1)

During my internship, I worked on two main projects:

Project 1: Improved features in the Insight section
Project 2: Developed an MVP for a 0-1 social media management feature

Project 1 - Background

What are the problems?

The Insights section in Uhomes Pro was designed to provide personalized and up-to-date market insights to property managers and management executives. It aims to help them make more informed pricing and marketing decisions, hence achieving better collaboration with the platform. However, the monthly active users (MAU) of the Insights section were 28% lower compared to the previous year. Through informal discussions with business managers, it seems that users are unsatisfied with the data presented.

The “Insight” page shows the key stats about user activity, demographics and competitor price

Primary research

My role in the project

An overview of the project outline

Who are the users, and what do they want to know? I started by identifying user characteristics and analyzing a typical workflow. I consulted with internal colleagues and reached out to target users to learn about our key users.

Early insights

Housing market is dynamic

Peak season for the student housing market lasts from April to August. Fast marketing decisions need to be made

Based on user and market insights, we prioritized the school distribution feature, which visualizes completed bookings. This provides essential insights and helps property managers identify potential clients and target marketing to specific schools. To ensure we have sufficient data to support this feature, I pulled data from UK and Hongkong to check data integrity.

For the past year (23/7/23 - present), 94% of completed bookings have school field
If property managers use this information to send targeted ads, they can double high-quality customers (those who saved the property) and increase interested customers (those who viewed the property) sixfold
Hence, the feature is feasible and has potential to add value for our suppliers

Data is coarse

The current dashboard only displays market-wise data. Lacks personalised and actionable details

Data insights

Iterations

Iteration 1.0 Bar chart displaying the distribution of completed orders

1.1 List top schools in order of booking

1.2 Display school distribution with pie chart

Iteration 2.0. Adds interaction and additional data display

Iteration 3.0. Add interactive data by school

Final design

Project 2 - Background

After building several features for the platform, my final project is to design and implement the MVP product of a social media package service. The key issues we are trying to solve are threefold:

Value Proposition

An integrated feature for property managers to upload media, with our team handling social media advertising.

Ideation and Prototype

I started by outlining the entire project in terms of user flow and data flow, while minimising the need for additional developement.

Final Design

Reflection

The key design challenge for me is the uncertainty of the outcome: we have to utilise existing resources to make the feature usable as soon as possible, to meet up with the rapidly changing demand market.

The way I envisioned the product differs significantly from the final outcome. Additionally, I found it quite challenging to apply human-centric design principles in a small-scale, business-oriented product. I ended up spending much more time focusing on system logic, edge cases, and general usability issues, rather than on the more nuanced aspects of user experience. This experience helped me understand the difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) contexts.