City of Seattle - LOA feature
OVERVIEW
In 2021, the City of Seattle had decided to add a feature to the existing customer portal. This new feature, LOA is for landlords, owners and agents where they could manage (start or stop) electric service for their tenants - online. Property managers can also add additional agents to their LOA agency to manage tenant's electric services.
Problem statement
Before deciding to create the LOA feature in the Portal, it was all done on paper. So managing a tenant's electric services required a lot of paperwork to be done (eg. filling up application form and physically mailing it to the Department and receiving confirmation letter of account created after weeks) which was very time consuming, difficult to keep track of and not environment-friendly.
Project Details
Solution
The new LOA feature allows Landlords, Owners of properties and Agents or property managers to manage the electric services for their tenants. It allows the person / agency to be associated with the property in concern and manage the payment of fees for that property or account(s).
Deliverables
Project requirements; Stakeholder discussions; Focus group discussions; Low-fi wireframe; Usability Testing; High-fi prototype
My Role
UX-UI Designer
Team
Me, 2 Project Managers, 2 Software Developers, 1 QA, 2 Business Analysts
Tools
Figma, Axure RP, MS Office
Timeline
Aug 2021 - Jun 2022
RESEARCH
Stakeholder Discussions
My first task was to hold workshops with key stakeholders. The purpose of these workshops was to bring stakeholders together and make them think about their target customers and the experience the portal feature should offer to their customers.
As we progressed with stakeholder interviews, research and discussions during these workshops, we also gathered data around the target users that the utility stakeholders felt needed to be addressed as part of the portal. Next step was the focus group discussions with the target users identified during the stakeholder discussions.
Focus Group Discussions with target users
We used focus group to best explore what people believe, how they feel, and what they perceive. The proper role of focus groups was not to assess interaction styles or design usability, but to discover what users want from the system and to learn from banter between people.
At the end of the focus group discussion, we received a lot of information that helped streamline our design process. It helped us greatly with the project requirements, types of users and their pain points. The information received was enough to proceed with our approach in form of 2 different models.
Person and Agency Model
We started shaping the LOA system design and our major use case profile was for a person or agent with less than 10 properties to manage.
We also tried to consider use cases where a person would have more than 10, sometimes 100 properties to manage. That is when an Agency model came into picture. Below are the Person and Agency Model exploration in greater detail.
After exploring the flow of these 2 models, it was time to study the real data. We looked at the LOA requests received in the previous years to determine the user profiles.
It was evident that majority of the users consisted of the high ROI i.e. submitted large volume of requests for a few properties. So after a discussion with the team, we decided that the Agency Model was the only way to go forward and the Persons Model was no longer applicable. The major pain points of the Person Model were property turnover and waiting time for the subsequent properties to be approved by NAMS. The decision was mainly based on the property association approval method (manual or automatic) and comparison of the 2 Models.
DESIGN & EVALUATION
Low-fi Prototype and User Testing
After the data we had and deciding to go forward with the Agency Model, I created the initial set of low fidelity wireframes. The first round of wireframes were created based on the Information Architecture derived from the sitemap, style guide and approved user flows.
DESIGN
We showed paper prototypes of the initial design, just the main screens to give our users an idea of what the LOA feature would be and to make the experience less overwhelming. We got great reviews on the prototype with vey minor confusions regarding the sub-feature.
Next Iterations and Second User Testing
We kept working on the design of the LOA feature as per the initial feedback from users, team and business. After 3 more rounds of iterations and finessing our designs, we went for our second user testing. This time it was a clickable prototype that was given to the users so that they could see for themselves how the feature would best support them and what all confusion and pain points they discover.
User Feedback
The overall feedback from the users was again positive. The users felt confident that their transaction history was shown regarding the properties they manage and that the agents within the same agency will have separate user profiles. About the user experience, they felt that the feature had a good structure and made sense and that it felt intuitive.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
With all the feedback from usability testing and stakeholder review implemented, it was time to implement visual design. We used existing brand guidelines for the City to create a subset style guide for the project and presented final mock-ups for approval before packaging them off for development.
