Team
Sr. Product Manager, Tech Lead, Product Operations Lead, 4 Engineers, QA Engineer, Lead Designer (partial)
Stakeholders
Sr. Director of Business and Product Operations, National Billing Specialist, Accounting Manager
Duration
75 Days (Q3 2022)
Hypothesis
Testing our Hypothesis during a 75 Day Experiment Window
Alfred acquired RKW Residential in early 2022, a property management company with 30,000 single-family and multi-family rentals in the Southeast US.
In the beginning of Q3, we launched an organization-wide initiative to prove that Alfred could help increase NOI and NPS with a small sample of these buildings by increasing community around a property.
Hypothesis
As we increase "community" around a property we will drive participation and super units.
Community
Events, Forum, Knowing neighbors / neighborhood
Participation
Unique views on events, offers, forum, service cards
Super Unit
Received in-home service, RSVP for event, redeems offer, engages with forum
Prioritization
Prioritizing Experiments Using RICE
Our team looked this initiative as an opportunity to make small iterations to the resident app and test some of the business leaders' and our hypotheses to drive engagement and increase NOI and NPS.
The PM came up with a list of 27 experiments and asked the lead designer and I to provide our input on design effort for each, so that we could use the RICE method to prioritize which experiments were feasible to implement and could potentially make the most impact.
Design Effort Criteria
1 = cleanup / simple task
2 = small feature / discovery
3 = medium-sized feature without detailed workflow / larger discovery
5 = larger feature
Considerations When Estimating Design Effort
Amount of work
How many screens, interactions, amount of content, etc.
Level of Risk & Uncertainty
How clear is the problem we are trying to solve?
Complexity
How simple or complex is the user flow?
Multiple states, requirements, dependencies, etc.
Examples of Experiments
Design
Rapid Designing
Given this 75 day timeline, I had to design based off of little data and being very cognizant of engineering effort and our timeline.
We decided to prioritize the following two experiments first:
Experiment 1
If we make the Forum more visible in the resident app, then participation will increase.
Experiment 2
If we make events more visible in the resident app, then participation will increase.
How Can We Easily Improve the Resident App?
Current Resident App
Opportunity for Improvement
Forum and Events are currently hidden in the Building Tab and are difficult for residents to easily find and discover.
Opportunity for Improvement
Leverage the "For You" tab to make Forum and Events More Visible, given that this is the first thing that residents see when they open the Alfred app.
Exploring Design Ideas for Creating a Feed
I started with exploring some design ideas - my first thought was to create a feed in the For You tab.
I decided to not move foward with this idea.
Creating a feed for Forum posts is dependent on residents participating in Forum on a regular and consistent basis.
- We may not have enough content on the resident app to build a true feed if residents in all buildings are not actively participating in Forum and posting on a consistent basis.
- Added complexity for building the logic on how to display items in a feed (what's the order of how we're displaying different items?, time period, etc.) which may require too much engineering effort for this 75 day plan
Final Design
Creating a Carousel View
Why I Landed On This Design
Carousel view allows user to see various types of content without a lot of vertical scrolling.
Categorization of Events/Spotlights/Forum allows us to easily display items in the appropriate order based on the category.
Displaying Forum and Events in the For You Tab makes it easier for users to participate and engage, can easily see all Events or Forum posts with the "See All" text button
Users can click into any specific event or forum post to access more information, RSVP, like and/or comment on a post.
Final Product Designs
Where We Landed and Success Metrics
We decided to start with building the carousel view for events only and move forward with two other experiments.
Events are a significant part of Alfred's offerings.
- Events are typically always available in a building
- Easier to implement given the limited timeline
- High RICE score
Making Forum posts more visible in the For You tab is contingent on the fact that residents are posting on a regular basis.
- If the most recent post is from 3 months ago, displaying a Forum post is not relevant to the user
How we Are Planning to Track Success
Baseline Metrics for Viewing Events
19.1%
Goal
30%
Later: Using an NPS survey tool to see how this impacts NPS
