Project overview
Story is a digital property management platform that are used by tenants and landlords. Through this platform, landlords can consolidate all information regarding their properties and tenants are able to pay their rent, security deposit, and see their lease status.
The problem
Landlords managing large properties struggled to efficiently bill tenants for shared expenses. Because invoices could only be created one unit at a time, property managers were forced to manually recreate the same invoice across dozens of units, resulting in a repetitive and time-intensive workflow.
Ideation and initial concepts
From the initial feedback received from our landlords, most users said that using an excel spreadsheet is how they track invoices and expenses. With this information, we wanted to make sure that it would be an option to upload an excel spreadsheet and use parced information to
Concept 1
The imported excel spreadsheet is parced and generated into a table view where users can make edits to any row needed.
Concept 2
The imported excel spreadsheet is parced and generated into a excel-like view that has the rows and columns from the excel spreadsheet.
A/B testing initial concepts
With the research, we tested 2 initial concepts with 11 landlords.
Key findings
10 of 11 landlords preferred Concept 2, citing its spreadsheet-like interface as more familiar, intuitive, and aligned with their existing workflows.
Users valued having a comprehensive, bird's-eye view of all invoice data in a single screen, allowing them to review and make edits more efficiently in concept 2.
Users expressed a need for a starter data step prior to bulk invoice creation, enabling them to pre-populate and download a spreadsheet template before uploading invoice data. This would reduce manual effort and improve the overall workflow.
Final Designs
Created an efficient bulk invoicing experience that enables landlords to generate starter data, review invoices in a comprehensive table view, and distribute invoices to multiple tenants at scale.
Starter data
Impact + results
When this bulk invoice feature was released, we received many positive affirmations from our landlord surveys. Some quotes from landlords include:
"This saved me a lot of time when sending out building wide bills. Thank you!"
"This made my job a whole lot easier. Very easy to understand."
"My favorite feature so far. Love it."
