BLJC

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Date

2007

Role

UI/UX Designer

Platform

Web, Blackberry

Overview

RealSuite is Real Estate Management Services to Effectively manage the real estate assets, including Real Estate Transaction & Advisory Services/Brokerage, Lease Administration, Lease Audit, Property Management, Building Operations & Maintenance Management, Technical Services, Building Automation & Remote Connectivity, Energy & Facility Solutions, Program & Project Management

RealProject is one of the tools in RealSuite which is focused in two areas:

Property Management and Lease Administration

My Role

With about 10 years experience in Graphic Design and UI and visual design for Web, I joined BLJC as a visual designer for some of their new products. That was my first experience working for a software company.

During 2007, I introduced to UX and learned about it and User Centered design and I started to study and research about more and became very enthusiastic.
As a result, I recommended my management to incorporate UX design principles in the projects and took the responsibly of all aspects of UX roles in my position in addition to the visual design.

Challanges

Property Owners would like to have more control of their international leases, including the centralized payment of rent and a focused approach to dealing with landlords on operational issues. Up until this point, all of the lease payments and interactions with landlords were being carried out by the local bureaus. These bureaus did not have the real estate expertise to properly manage the landlords and ensure landlord compliance with the lease documents.

Also, they need facility management services, including managing the energy performance and operational spend for all locations.

Solution

RealProject maximizes the return and value of the assets. BLJC as a pure services company provides a full range of property management services to take care of every aspect of tenant relations, daily property operations, maintenance and management, capital planning and capital improvements.

For lease administration, our solution began with introductions between the client and key team members in IT and Finance in order to develop a strategy to achieve an International Rent Roll.

This solution involved the following steps:

creating new Bill Codes, Billing Groups in the system to run a separate rent roll for International Leases
Issuing Lease Management Notices to the various landlords
Obtaining the necessary banking information from each landlord
Validating information entered by Corporate Finance
Performing testing functions in a test environment
Lease Management of International Leases includes:
rent payments;
assistance with operational matters that arise, including lease interpretation and correspondence with landlords to address operational issues by enforcing lease clauses etc.

Key features:

Key features:: Tenant Relations/Retention, Property Accounting, Budgeting, Transactions Services, Operations, Rent Collection, Preventative Maintenance, Project Management

Lease Abstraction, Document Management, Lessee Representation, Rent Roll, Critical Dates and Options Management, Forecast and Budgeting, Property Tax Management

Team & Stakeholders

Product Team

I worked closely with my Product manager (PM), Business Analyst and developers. My PM and I worked together to prioritize the backlog of seemingly endless problem statements and features to tackle those; we worked with the engineering team to help scope the potential features and brainstormed ideas for the multiple ways to implement them.

Customers

The users, including receptionists at call center, project managers, and vendors.

Research

Who are the users?

The target users of RealProject are receptionists at the call center, project managers, and vendors.
The important thing to note about our users was that they were not using these tools because they liked them: they're using it to get a job done. They have a goal defined by their position that they need to accomplish, and they are given the tools they use. The biggest complexity with these users is that every project is defined and carried out a little differently. The application had to work for multiple projects from the consumer, to call center, to project managers, to vendors. Finding the common goals and solutions across different type of users continued to be a challenge for RealProject as a product.

I started to overshadow the users to see how they work with the current application. Then I interviewed them and made a persona of each.

Design Process

Low Fidelity Designs Sketches and Wireframes

I facilitated exploration sessions with PM through whiteboard documentation or design exercises. Then I'd begin sketching flow diagrams or layout concepts.  

At certain checkpoints, it was time to review the various iterations. After those were addressed, I may have jumped into a wireframing to get a better feel for the flow, interactions, and general usability with our more refined problem/goal in mind.