Accounting App

UX research - UI/UX design - Product design - Product management - UX copywriting - Front end development
Project Overview
After my time at I'll Go Get It, I found myself looking for another position. I was searching for something similar, as I liked the atmosphere of working on a small team. I joined a startup company called Dials as a founding product designer with two co-founders who had experience in robotics and were also ex-colleagues. They explained to me it would be a specialized fintech SaaS solution similar to Gusto, only for independently managed homeowners associations (HOAs). I have to admit, I was a little intimidated to work in the realm of finance, but I think it ended up being a great challenge.
My Contributions
The MVP for this product was built from scratch and launched within a year with ~300K in seed funding. We had 100+ sign ups and multiple HOAs with 10+ homeowners using the platform. I worked under a principal engineer/product manager to:

- Shipped 5 products from scratch within the Dials portal
- Designed and developed marketing website from scratch
- Wrote PR content (1 blog post per month) to increase awareness
- Maintained and posted on 3 social media accounts
Context
There are 2 types of HOA’s that exist: professionally managed HOAs who are managed by a third party property management company, and on the other hand, independently managed HOA’s that are managed by the board themselves.

Independently managed HOAs exist because they do not have enough people living on their property to make proper use of a third party management company's time and effort.
Problem
Independently managed HOAs are forced to manage their properties without professional tooling or consultation. They spend hours of manual work and cannot take advantage of the current software on the market because it's too expensive and has features that do not apply to them.
Solution
My team envisioned building specialized, affordable, property management tools for independently managed HOAs where the platform would serve as the middleman between homeowner payments and payment destination. An ACH transaction line through partnership with banks was established, resulting in cheaper costs and a more affordable product for customers while also giving us the ability to handle transactions at large scale. Aside from the finance nature of the solution, the team favored discussions around technology and what kind of features could be offered. With tech already built around robotics, self driving, and perception- discussion around being able to forecast upcoming repairs and providing smart budgets for our users was a motivating factor.
Market research
The HOA industry is valued at over $100B in annual spending. I was tasked with doing research on the space to gain further knowledge about the space in which I would be designing in.
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User interviews & pain points
I was flown out to California to meet some of our first customers and potential angels. Most of these individuals expressed interest in the company because of our aim at smaller properties, and of course, the hosting of online tools which would save them mounts of time.

I talked to property managers who were treasurers on their boards, presidents, third party vendors, and homeowners who were part of these associations to better understand the users feelings and discover pain points.

Many had similar feelings on what product would work best to spread awareness, and how immersive experiences create better products.
Key features and solutions
Based off the empathy interviews and pain points discussed, the team realized that at its core, a web based financial tool would be the most beneficial for our customers, while offering in its peripheral, a suite of management tools to help with general transparency and organization.

Features would include accounting tools that users can utilize through a web app by the process of sending invoices, collecting dues, and creating custom budgets with the ability to do maintenance tracking. Upon utilization of these tools properly, users can achieve monthly and long term financial goals within their association while also maintaining healthier relationships with homeowners.
Value proposition map
In order to communicate this research in a more engaging and visually pleasing way, I created this value proposition map with a full suite of features that addressed all of our users pain points.
Personas
After my trip to California and some reflection, I started to use the Lord of the Rings movies and Frodo’s relationship with the ring as a metaphor to describe our customers seeing that most of them were under-qualified, unpaid, and forced into power because nobody else wanted or could do the job.

I elaborated on this idea further in a blog post while entertainingly describing similarities between our kind hearted customers and some of middle earth's finest heroes.
User journey map
I mapped out the users emotions during the product discovery. I noticed after some research, most concerns were around questioning the security of the app and if their personal information would be safe.
Task flow #1:
Sign up and get started
One of the main user experiences I designed was the user onboarding. It’s goal was to collect just enough information from the user so that they could get started with the application as soon as possible.

I used flowcharts to conceptualize processes such as this one to help my thought process throughout development.
User flow and site map
I mapped out where these workflows would exist inside the overall application through the utilization of sitemaps. This helped explain a more comprehensive view of the information architecture and made how data would be organized in the platform easier to understand.
High fidelity wireframes
I began to create wire frames of the onboarding experience- deciding the layout and visual style of these modal popups and doing the UX copy writing.
Walkthrough and design
This is how the feature would look when finished, and how the user would navigate the flow.
Task flow #2:
Creating an assessment
Another user experience I designed was around the ability of a property manager to create a custom budget for a group of homeowners around a future expense. This is also known as an "Assessment". Assessments are added to a homeowners monthly dues statement which affect the total amount owed by the homeowner. Confusion around this topic sparked our interest in clarifying this subject which resulted in me writing another blog post on how homeowners dues are calculated.

The kicker to this feature was that it also provided the ability to batch invoice a group of people who were all on different payment plans, resulting in a huge advantage on our end among our competitors.

The creation of this feature reduced the amount of work from tens of hours per month to just minutes.
User flow and sitemap
The feature would exist in the assessment section of the application, where the user would create a new assessment and keep a table of all created assessments.
High fidelity wireframes
I created high fidelity wireframes of the feature, decided the layout and wrote the UX copywriting which was very important when explaining the userflow to customers.
Walkthrough and design
This is how the final UI looked when it was complete. I advocated for a multi-step UX solution rather than a single page to eliminate scrolling and leveraged Gusto’s charity donation UX to get my team on board with the idea.
Development proccess
I worked with one of my founders, a software engineer, about 85% of the time to design and build the software. This was done initially through verbal discussion of business goals and features needed while I weighed in on what to build next or what else would be a good idea to create. I used Figma to build UI mockups which were then passed off for implementation.

The other 15% of the time was spent with my other founder, where I discussed with him the future of the company, distribution methods, and collaborating on building presentations to raise funding. Overall, I was extremely happy with the culture and really appreciated the clear thinking of my team.
Implementation
During the building process, I oversaw not just the UX of the app, but the overall visual style and maintenance of the design system. The gender neutral teal color represented a sense of trust and and boldness. In an attempt to eliminate back and forth discussions regarding colors, fonts, and graphics, I prepared a style guide which ended up being useful.
Usability testing
To test our product, I asked our early adopters to engage with the prototype. I created a list of actions for our users to test out in the form of a “Getting Started” checklist and recorded their thoughts and reactions.

Some of the pain points expressed among the feedback I received was regarding the terminology used in the “Add an assessment” flow and the amount of information that was asked located inside a single popup.
Data driven decisions
When time allowed, I managed and social media efforts, generated creative content, and analyzed efforts using Mailchimp’s, Facebook’s, and Wordpress’ data analytics features.

While doing so, I had a direct impact on the amount of signups by making a key decision based on a data comparison between ad exposure and sign ups along with a deep analysis of the marketing website. I decided to propose a website redesign (image below, right) based off this knowledge and presented my case along with some visual evidence from well done splash pages around the web. 

I was able to get the team on board with my idea and several weeks later I presented a new design. It featured an improved user experience strategy with a responsive design, clearer, more concise marketing copy and an additional way to sign up for the platform by also allowing users to “do it themselves”. When the new site went live, we saw an increase in sign ups roughly 20 percent and an increase in registered users.
Reflection
The job of a property manager is an unglamorous act usually done out of the good of one's heart. I realized that property managers were hard to reach seeing that some are elderly or simply do not use email at all. I learned a lot about how budgets are maintained in a corporate structure and always tried to make light of the situation. I hope one day these individuals are able to do their job more easily so they can spend less time doing manual tasks and more time with their families!
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