Renovating the real estate management service experience
Joining a growing property services platform facing project delays, I led design for MyLessen, the customer-facing portal. Focusing the dashboard on urgent actions cut project completion time by 30%, helping property managers return rentals to revenue faster.
In need of a fresh coat of paint
Property managers live on vacancy. Every idle day is lost rent, so anything that stalls a renovation hits their numbers. Lessen could onboard clients in days, but once work started, managers could not see or clear the blockers holding projects in place.
MyLessen was supposed to be the place they acted. Instead they were jumping between the portal, their Lessen project managers, and search — trying to figure out which properties needed them most.
Breaking ground
The dashboard was not on the roadmap, but feedback kept pointing at it. I started with a heuristic markup, then session replays, instead of waiting for a brief.
Critical actions were buried, statuses were too vague to act on, and managers found properties through search instead of the page in front of them. Those were not UI quirks — they were why projects sat still.
Sanding down the rough edges
If we surface urgent actions on the dashboard, will users clear blockers faster?
Low-fidelity wires were how I aligned the product team while scope was still moving. The first pass stayed close to the existing system and cut noise. The next made resolve-in-product the point — stronger CTAs so customers acted in MyLessen instead of pinging their project manager.
What customers actually needed
These concepts got the work onto a fall launch, though alignment with product on what MyLessen actually needed to do wasn't always straightforward. Requirements moved as we learned more, so I iterated through a wide range of concepts, using what I was learning directly from customers to help settle decisions product was still working through.
The product manager didn't support formal user testing, so I reached five customers directly through support myself. They were direct: the dashboard organized properties by Lessen's internal renovation work-order numbers, a structure set before I joined, and none of them recognized those numbers. They think in addresses. We dropped Following, pivoted the dashboard to lead with address, and tightened it around urgent actions.
A fresh coat of paint
Customer feedback and a tighter brief let us ship a dashboard that leads with what needs a decision. Property managers see the blocker, the home, and the action without leaving the page.
Impact
The redesigned dashboard got projects finished faster, which shortened vacancy and put rentals back on the market sooner.
- 30% decrease in project completion time in the first month
- 68% decrease in action resolution time by customers
Accomplishments
- Ran a heuristic markup, session-replay review, and customer interviews to show why the dashboard was stalling projects — before it was a priority.
- Used low-fidelity concepts to get the work onto a fall launch, then cut a PM-proposed Following feature after five customers said they did not need extra views.
- Shipped a dashboard that leads with urgent actions.
Reflection
The Following feature wasn't really the lesson, the numbers were. Lessen had organized the product around its own internal renovation taxonomy, and no one had tested whether that matched how customers actually thought about their properties. It didn't. The fix wasn't a better feature, it was noticing that an internal operational structure isn't a customer's mental model until someone checks.
Additional explorations
Progress Walks
Progress Walks was still shipping when I was laid off. Field project managers were uploading renovation photos through a paid third-party app; routing that same photo capture through the Lessen FPM app let clients watch a property move forward without a site visit, while retiring the licensing cost of the tool it replaced.