Archstone was a REIT with high-end multi-family residential properties across the United States. I was hired as Archstone's first UI Designer and was tasked with establishing design patterns, accessibility standards, brand guidance, HTML and CSS templates and additional product design tasks.
My primary focus started with the customer-facing online portals, and expanded into interactive kiosks installed in the lobbies and common areas of select properties. The kiosks provided leasing and marketing information. We built a mobile companion to the standalone kiosks in the form of a locally installed iPad app that communicated with the data storage within the property kiosk.
Most projects began with sketches and brainstorming with the software engineering team, and communication with on-site personnel for relevant constraints unique to each property. We conducted user research and interviews with existing tenants to gather feedback on how they used the client portal for communication, events, payments and maintenance requests.
Wirefames and designs were provided to the development team, and usually included front-end code examples for aligning CSS files with established brand standards used across the company.
The redesign of the client portal provided several welcome improvements: cleaner interfaces, improved load times and more robust functionality to find previous payments, manage payment info and historical data on maintenance and communication.
The sales kiosk provided several benefits to on-site staff, allowing prospects to get information at their own page, freeing up sales staff to assist a larger amount of candidates each day. The mobile kiosk iPad app was a powerful sales tool to help associates have on-demand, real-time information as they toured properties, showcased amenities and answered questions.
