Re-imagining the Urban Living Experience

When tenants search for a space to live in, they often base their decision on location, location, and location. But RXR Realty, the third-largest commercial real estate owner in New York, challenged themselves to focus on a new priority: customer experience.

Democratizing 5-star Living

Think of your experiences staying in 5-star hotels: dustless rooms, convenient concierge services, and an app that helps with your booking and payment. Why not bring this to apartments?

Who are my users?

Right off the bat, I faced a big challenge: “the Spotify problem”, so proposed zooming into urban tenants who are more likely to seek additional residential services:

• Urban areas in NYC

  • Managed properties

    • Affordable luxury apartments

6 locations were picked for the user research. With another designer’s help, I researched 34 residents across the locations on the map and 16 client employees who lived in similar apartments.

They are my users!

The personas were created based on residents we interviewed plus anonymized demographic data that the client provided to us. With such an accurate and in-depth understanding of our users, there were 5 metrics to measure their lifestyles:

What do my users need?

Specifically, we surveyed every resident on potential services they would love their buildings to offer and may even pay for. It turned out that convenience services were the highest value for residents, with housekeeping receiving the broadest appeal.

What should our MVP be?

To synthesize the research, we discovered the most important 3 areas where our client can provide exceptional “phygital value”. Through the following service offerings, our client will create the foundational differentiator, delivering 5-star living experiences to customers.

Unifying our vision

One of the important tasks for consulting designers is to unite all shareholders to pave a path for our success. This was done via an ideation workshop. In 2 days, people from both the field and corporate got together, engaged design-thinking activities, and generated wonderful ideas with us. Several activities were conducted in the workshop to sparkle ideas, including:

• Persona deep dive

• Journey mapping

• Rapid ideation

• Affinity grouping

It is always amazing to see such a level of creativity coming from the notes and sketches, which inspired me to move on to the next step.

Building a successful MVP

With everything ready to go, the agile team started sprinting along with the service team tackling the physical experience.

From low fidelity wireframe to high, here is the breakdown of all the prioritized features one by one:

Navigation

From early iterations to later ones, the home screen went through major changes with the following directions:

1. Personal to each user with property-specific visual and name call-out

2. Faster reach to any function with an accessible navigation system

3. The information is displayed in a context-relevant manner

No-password sign-in flow

When it comes to logging in, we are all tired of having to memorize usernames and passwords. After a number of security discussions with developers (and lawyers), I found a path to balance between convenience and security: “second-factor authentication” based on our user research findings:

• The user never wants to log off

• The user’s phone number is associated with their lease, hence they don’t change the number

• The App’s security level is no higher than the security level of the user’s smartphone itself

Payment

One of the biggest challenges of this engagement is the lack of digital branding guidelines. Therefore, as I iterated user interfaces, I also iterated fonts/colors, and eventually adapted this app into the flat design system given more users owned iOS devices based on our research.

RXR design system built for the residential app:

Booking flow

More pages to click through is usually a bad idea. However, when I tried to reduce the page count by making the cleaning details page optional and putting an instruction field on the checkout page, I sensed that users could be confused by such a large content load.

To test my theory, I reached out to the same testers for a re-test to simulate seasoned users, and all of them turned out to be faster with version B, the “more clicks” version.

This finding reminded me that we should always consider multiple variables when conducting user testing, differentiate first-time testing results from re-use results, and always think about the why behind our testing results.

Brand identity & scalability

A good App is designed to grow and thrive even when the designer moves on. To bring real impact to the client, I made the app future-proof by using modular components with interchangeable assets to ensure the interface can be easily customized to another property without losing its brand consistency.

5-star living democratized

After months of innovation and arduous work, the RXO Home app was released for both iOS and Android and received great success in many KPI metrics.

Ensure successful handover

An organized design file is like a piece of clean, well-commented code. The hand-off went smoothly as the research and design were well recorded with rich content and guidance on how future designers could best get to speed.