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ISSUE 01
B2B SaaS UI Branding

Reducing Scheduling Friction By ~55%

Designing Rent Manager's first shared scheduling platform to unify property managers, technicians, and tenants

Business Challenge

What was broken, why it needs to be fixed & who benefits once we do

Overview

Property managers, technicians, and tenants relied on fragmented workflows to coordinate maintenance across multiple properties. Without a centralized scheduling system, teams manually tracked technician availability, coordinated appointments through calls and emails, and struggled to keep everyone aligned—resulting in delays, miscommunication, and unnecessary operational overhead.

My Role
  • Led end-to-end product design (visual, interaction, design systems)
  • Cross-functional partnership with Product and Engineering
  • Prototyping, research, validation, and launch
The Crew
Sydney H. — Designer  ·  Michelle P. — Business Analyst
Timeline
Feb ‘23 – Jan ‘24
Tools
Adobe XD · Adobe Illustrator
Constraint 01

0 → 1 Design

There were no established patterns to build from.

Constraint 02

Legacy Enterprise Platform

New workflows had to coexist with existing functionality.

Constraint 03

$ Premium Feature

The feature must demonstrate clear customer value.

Solution

A shared workflow designed for everyday coordination

Rent Manager Maintenance Schedule board, showing scheduled issues by maintenance tech and time block TWA Settings tour, showing how to limit issues per block or remove availability Maintenance tech hours view, showing a technician's weekly availability
Impact: Reduced scheduling friction by 55% Designed and launched 0-1 Introduced 6 scalable design patterns

Pain Points

How we identified the biggest sources of friction across users

Pain points across tenants, technicians, and property managers

Research

Insights that informed our design decisions

What We Did

After speaking with a number of users who showed us they were using several softwares to schedule service issues, we dug in to what other property management systems were doing to figure out how we could do it better. We used a mix of:

Contextual Inquiry

User Interviews

Competitive Analysis

AppFolio's maintenance request feature Yardi's maintenance feature

Design

Exploring iterations and tradeoffs to reach a user centric solution

Maintenance Schedule board, first iteration Maintenance Schedule board, second iteration Add Maintenance Techs wizard, first iteration Add Maintenance Techs wizard, second iteration

Flyout onboarding tour

Flyout Tour component

Flyout tour component in Rent Manager Express

Impact

How the business and its users benefitted after launch

My Influence

I established new design standards, improved collaboration between product and engineering teams, and enhanced craft across the product

Prospect Leasing Board, annotated to highlight the Boards view and an Entity Card
Add Maintenance Techs walkthrough wizard, annotated
Placeholder noting an animation made in Figma is coming soon

Reduced user friction by 55%

Reduced user friction by 55% by prioritizing the five highest-impact user problems for the initial release.

Designed and launched from 0-1

Designed and launched Rent Manager's scheduling platform from 0→1, improving day-to-day coordination while creating a licensable, revenue-generating feature.

Introduced 6 scalable design patterns

Introduced 6 scalable design patterns that have since been adopted across the software.

Reflections

Hindsight is 20/20

What I Learned

  • Not every problem needed to be solved in the first release.
    By identifying the 5 highest-impact problems we were able to ship a focused experience rather than trying to build every part of a new workflow at once.
  • The most lasting impact wasn't limited to what we shipped.
    Designing a 0→1 experience gave me the opportunity to establish interaction patterns that could solve similar problems elsewhere in the product, further reinforcing the value of designing for systems, not just individual features.

What I'd Do Differently

Now that the initial feature is shipped, I would like to go back and create the weekly view that was cut from scope due to time.

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