Custom Maintenance Tech Mobile Experience
Goal
NPS responses and customer feedback indicated that our property management software’s maintenance features were lacking. Our goal was to explore the space, and find opportunities for improvement in order to streamline processes for our users.
Process
With such a lofty goal, we didn’t know exactly where to start. So we took a deep dive and investigated the space. First, we did an interactive activity as a team to put ourselves in the lives of the players in the Maintenance space.
Next, we did customer visits to meet our users in person and see their offices. Some of our team members even did ride alongs with the on site maintenance techs.
Lastly, we did customer research calls with a handful of customers who responded negatively to our NPS survey. I took all this research and created the diagram below to visualize the journey of a tenant’s maintenance request. This would help us narrow down where we could start implementing improvements.
We identified a big gap in communication between Maintenance Techs and their Managers in the office. We realized this was a huge opportunity to create a new mobile friendly interface for Maintenance Techs to use in the field to streamline communication and to digitize the current paper heavy process.
After determining key features the mobile experience needed to help out Maintenance Techs, we whiteboarded different design ideas as a team. I consolidated the ideas, and created a prototype to test. We tested the prototype at Home Depot with people who self identified as working in the maintenance field, along with our customers.
Final Product
After a few iterations based on customer feedback we had our final mobile friendly design. This incorporated all the functionality we knew would be necessary to get our new Maintenance Tech users interacting with our software in the field to create more efficient streamlined communication with their managers back in the office.
