GatewayLive is a Console deployed product for property management and trust accounting. Console saw the need to rebuild GatewayLive from scratch into a cloud based saas platform to automate workflows, add additional functionalities and integrations, and massively improve existing features.
UX research and design
The existing GatewayLive product, though powerful, was viewed as confusing, outdated, frustrating, and clunky. Users wanted to be able to access it while on the go or at home, as many of Console’s competitors were starting to offer cloud based products.
The old product - a classic.
The first and most important step of this year long project, was to understand our property managers who used the product and to get a better understanding of the ins and outs of the current product. To do this, we went all across Brisbane to over 15 realty offices to watch property managers in action. We got to see what sticky notes they had on their computers, what tricks they had up their sleeves as work arounds, and we got to hear their frustrations, hopes, and dreams.
To better understand the product, we looked to our product owners and call support team, to take us through how the product worked, and why, as well as what were the most frequently asked questions and pain points.
Whiteboard from after our product owner took us through how to add a new property into the current system.
Once we had a better understanding of the product we were revamping and the people we were doing it for, we set out organize the content and develop user flows. Many iterations and tests were done during this phase, as it was key that our users understood and agreed with the new content organization and flows.
Mapping out how a user would add a new property to the system and the various routes to go about it depending on user needs.
Once content, layout, and functionalities had been decided upon, a working prototype was made. User testing was carried out bi-weekly on new features of the working prototype, including testing at a property management conference to test with a wider population set. Insights from this testing then led us to iterate on our designs.
First sketches of how to add a new property.
Initial prototype of how to add a new property.
Higher fidelity iteration of add (and edit) a property.
After user testing, prototype designs were turned into hi-fidelity designs with updates based on user feedback. Once visual designs were finalised and approved, I worked with the development team through to production.
Final design of the owner file.
Final designs for reconciliation section.
One of the biggest struggles with this project was trying to balance creating something completely new vs. keeping things people were familiar with. As this is a system that people had been working with for over 20-years, any drastic changes were really going to disorient and potentially frustrate our users. As a relatively new designer at the time, I did not always understand this; and so, through some particularly harsh user testing sessions, I quickly started to understand that new was not always better and there was value to the way things had been done, I just needed to see it and augment it.
This was also my first experience working closely with developers and product managers. To learn from the developers the constraints they were living with and how the different databases worked and talked (or didn't talk) to each other was eye-opening for me. The more I understood from the developers, the better my designs and easier hand-offs were.
As this was part of my consulting work, I unfortunately do not have any data to talk to the success and/or failure of this work once it was live. I do have, however, the qualitative data that as we iterated and iterated on the product, our user testing session went better and better, with people getting more excited and comfortable with the idea of the new, cloud-based product.