Background:

In the senior living facility management space it is imperative to maintain the quality, safety and compliance of buildings from an investment perspective and to attract new residents. There are many corporate, regional, and localized team members that work together to maintain the building and prioritize renovations.

Corporate team members are responsible for planning capital budgets for facilities and the corporation as a whole. They must manage the budget short term (during the year) and long term (5 years +). This project involved learning how team members handled these tasks and discovering the pain points they had to determine if there was an opportunity for Direct Supply to innovate on.

Actions:

• Qualitative discovery user interviews

• Design sprint

• Multiple structured rounds of qualitative interviews with users

• Journey mapping

• Collaborative whiteboarding with Product Manager, UX Designer and Lead Developer

• Prototype testing with users

Insights:

• ‘Status labels’ for different categories of financial approval were adapted to fit the language and approval workflow of corporate users

• A dashboard was created to highlight important actionable data matching user needs

• The workflows for adding a planned project or capital expense were adapted to user pain points and needs

• Workflow information was gathered about the communication of requested projects between different levels of the organization

Result:

The user research influenced both the user experience design and the priority of features on the roadmap. By testing with prototypes to refine the feature set, the product manager was able to successfully advocate for more development time to fit the MVP.