Project tags
Performance Data
Company
Homebase is a SaaS platform for residential and commercial properties to manage WiFi and its connected devices including access, security, and smart home technology.
Users
Portfolio owners of multifamily and commercial properties.
Challenge
Customers do not have access to metrics involving in the platform and their property and aren’t clear on how to improve their ROI.
Role
The company’s sole end-to-end product designer working under the Chief Product Officer.
Goal
Create a report that highlights both customer successes that demonstrate SaaS value and failures with support for improvement.
Discovery
User Persona
One of the lessons I learned in a previous project was to carefully consider who the target user is, without also trying to fit the needs of adjacent users. In this case, we needed to focus on the portfolio owners and not the property managers. I created user personas for 8 total user categories to help clarify the end goal.
I was able to meet one key portfolio owner to learn about how they think and what has led them to success using the Homebase platform.
Business Needs
The Customer Success team had already identified a need for performance data to customers, especially those struggling with the ROI of their WiFi infrastructure. The team was producing custom reports with basic business tools like Google Spreadsheets and Slides. These were a great jumping off point but needed content automated and targeted to the users’ needs.
User Needs
The Homebase platform brings huge opportunities for customers’ revenue if they are strategic with their implementation. This project aims at giving the data and the support needed to reach their goals.
Potential Data
Getting concrete feedback directly from portfolio owners was incredibly difficult. So I had to be scrappy and was able to collect data points used by the Customer Success team as well as feedback from various stakeholders like the Sales team to get a better insight into the data’s direction.
It was very important to sort out feasibility early on in the process to ensure we don’t include data points that are currently not collected or would be too complex at this stage to visualize. I collaborated with Engineering to better understand what would be possible with these new data points.
Design
Designing the Structure
I focused my early wireframing on how to group content categories in a way that made it feel intuitive, easily applicable month after month, and not overwhelming. I then collaborated closely with Customer Success to narrow down each data point and how we visually represent each.
Early Iterations
As I moved into designing in Figma, I got feedback that the design looked a lot like a bill or invoice with larger content grouped in cards. I decided more divided content felt more appropriate for the content and avoided looking like an invoice.
Looking back, I probably focused a bit too much on the style earlier on in the process but was able to move the project along at a quick pace regardless.
Information Architecture
After crafting a direction for the page structure, I thought through how this feature fit into the existing structure. Pages fall into the “Overview” or “Manage” sections based on the actions a user can take within each. This is definitely “Overview” material but it doesn’t fall into the existing tabs. Furthermore, this content is only relevant and accessible for portfolio owner-level users.
High-Fidelity + Handoff
After working up to high-fidelity while collaborating with stakeholders including engineers to ensure feasibility, we were ready to build the first milestone. My Figma design calls out where we would make tradeoffs to expedite execution and test the success of the data before adding additional details.
Conclusion
Results
This is an initial step in a larger roadmap to provide much more performance detail, including access performance as the design shows in a second tab. We tested the reception of this content and learned a few things along the way.
The results are probably best demonstrated by the addition of 3 communities from existing customers within the first few months. I interpreted this as a positive sign that are speaking the portfolio owners’ language and conveying value in a way that boosts their overall assessment of our product and services.
Next Steps
Probably the biggest takeaway post-launch was that we needed to meet these users where they are. In some cases, this meant Customer Success or Sales setting up meetings with portfolio owners to go over their data. We weren’t getting the traffic we had hoped in the launch and need to consider better marketing for the new feature.
An easier route might be sending this performance data in email at the end of each month with a PDF that pulls content from the platform. We are investigating options to test this out.
In addition, we would begin to explore how we could measure digital access performance.
