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InspectRealEstate - Using the Way of Working to Re-design Software

InspectRealEstate is Australia's leading property management software. It enables the automation of day-to-day tasks that property managers, leasing agents and agency principals would normally have to complete manually. By automating these tasks, InspectRealEstate empowers its clients and their teams to focus time on the areas of the business that matter most, rather than the routine tasks that take up precious time.

Backstory

Andrew, one of the founders of InspectRealEstate started his career as an accountant before co-founding a property management firm, prorentals.com.au. After selling prorentals.com.au, Andrew took the vast knowledge gained from that business to start InspectRealEstate with fellow co-founder Mike. The company quickly became Australia's leading property management software, with its flagship product, ROL Rentals, being used in more than 2,000 agencies nationwide.

Our Approach

InspectRealEstate reached out to WorkingMouse to assist them with improving the look and feel of their flagship product, ROL Rentals, which hadn’t seen any changes in its design since its inception. This was slightly different to how we traditionally approach a project as the focus was on the re-design of their system, rather than scoping to prepare for the development of the system. With this in mind, the InspectRealEstate and WorkingMouse teams agreed on a problem statement, “How do we feel proud about the future look and feel?” This enabled the team to focus the scope on creating an InspectRealEstate design system that could be used when updating their product suite or developing a new solution and re-designing the core pages of the ROL Rentals platform with a new UX/UI.

The WorkingMouse team worked with the InspectRealEstate team and their customers to understand how their clients use the ROL Rentals platform using a human-centred design approach. Using our Way of Working, we split the process up into four stages; Understand, Observe, Ideate and Prototyping/Design System.

During the understand stage, WorkingMouse performed a number of activities to learn more about the problem. Utilising the discovery kit, the team defined the criteria of success for the project and mapped their users current flow through ROL Rentals. Once we had an understanding of the problem it was time to observe. We reached out to InspectRealEstate's users to validate the assumptions made by mapping out the various personas using the platform and conducting discovery interviews.

Now that the problem was validated, we began ideating on potential solutions. We prioritised the jobs the team needed to complete and began rapid sketching of potential solutions that covered the flow of a new and existing user interacting with ROL Rentals. This allowed us to create the basic user experience and explore potential solutions. The final stage involved producing Hi-Fi click through prototypes, conducting user testing and refining the prototype based on the feedback to ensure the designs met the needs of the end user. The team then took the components created for the prototype to flesh out the design system.

What was delivered

Utilising our Way of Working, the WorkingMouse team at the conclusion of the scope delivered a design system, HiFi prototypes and database schema model that would enable InspectRealEstate to begin the implementation of the updated look and feel of ROL Rentals. A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled to build any number of products.

The design system produced by WorkingMouse will enable the InspectRealEstate team to apply the various components created to update the look and feel of ROL Rentals. Further, the design system will also enable InspectRealEstate to apply the components to their other products. The prototypes produced describe the key screens the team were tasked to redesigned. These prototypes outline the new user flow for the redesigned pages that the InspectRealEstate team can utilise alongside the design system when updating the ROL Rentals look and feel. Finally, the WorkingMouse team using the ROL Rentals database schema, recreated a MVP (minimum viable product) of ROL Rentals using the Codebots platform.

The Future

Having delivered the scope, the InspectRealEstate team is in the process of planning how to implement the artefacts created and begin the development of the new look and feel of ROL Rentals using their internal development team.