Stacking Plans

Stacking plans are a visual representation used in real estate to display what tenants occupy each space in a building or asset. The goal of this project was to address the core issues reported by VTS customers to drive feature adoption and retention.

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Project details

Company

VTS

Timeframe

October 2021 - Feb 2022

Details

Stacking plans are a visual representation of a building/asset to showcase what tenants are occupying each space/floor. VTS user's utilize this feature extensively to get a quick understanding of the status of their tenants and asset in general.

Although it is one of the most utilized features at VTS, it has also lacked product investment for several years and was not meeting the needs of our users. The issues were so critical that a percentage of our users bypassed using VTS stacking plans altogether and were building their own internally using Excel. The goal of this project was to address the core issues with the feature to uplevel the experience and keep users within the platform.

Platforms

Web

Role

User research, problem definition, UX design, UI design

Key deliverables

Product gap analysis, redesigned workflows, wireframes, user testing, high fidelity designs

The Process

Prior to beginning this project, there was a lot of uncertainty about what my squad (PM, Eng, QA, Design) would be working on next. We lacked strong Product presence, so there was nothing solidified on our roadmap. As a result, I took the initiative to seek out a worthwhile initiative until we had an idea of our next steps. I followed this process to go from problem discovery to final delivery.

Defining the Problem

The process started with sifting through our feedback portal (AHA) and Zendesk to uncover highly reported platform issues. After grouping common themes, I worked with our Customer Support and Customer Success teams and verified that Stacking Plans was one of our most utilized features, but also had a significant amount of issues impacting customers. I then took all the feedback from AHA, CS/CA, and customer calls and created an affinity diagram in Miro.

UX Audit & Project Scoping

After collecting data around reported issues, I did a comprehensive breakdown of the feature to investigate further and call out any other identified issues. I then walked through this with my product manager and tech lead to identify what work could be in-scope for this initiative by prioritizing based on high customer value vs low engineering effort.

Wait..
why does this matter?

Next, we had to get buy-in from the business that this was a project worth pursuing. To do this, we created a slide-deck communicating how this project aligns with our well defined long and short term business objectives and target customers. We further communicated the point through calculating and presenting impacted revenue from existing customers and quantitative product analytics.

VTS OKR

Business value

customer value

Increase customer retention

Keep users within VTS Ecosystem

Entry point for further product adoption

Highly reported user pain point

Do not have to manually create in excel

Simplifies workflow

Access additional data

Better collaboration w/ team

Countless feature requests / bugs

Heavily utilized feature

Design Explorations

We then created a list of prioritized user stories to encapsulate what we wanted to accomplish and defined what success would look like for the project. The upfront research paid off because I had a good sense of potential solutions as soon as I started designing. Regardless, I worked through a range of solutions to generate many ideas and not narrow our options before we got a chance to think through various ideas.

Testing & Takeaways

We tested the above designs with both internal and external stakeholders and came out with tangible takeaways that we then applied to the designs.

Logic Building

One of the biggest challenges of this project was accommodating for seemingly infinite different types of buildings it could be used for. The solution had to intelligently scale both in-platform and on export, so we needed to build logic for these scenarios. After many iterations, I came to a conclusion using percentages and min/max width logic that was then implemented by our engineers.

Final Designs

The final solution was released through a phased, iterative approach where we worked alongside customers as work was being completed to ensure it met expectations. Fortunately through this process, we were able to add scope to the initiative and deliver more than originally expected because of the momentum and excitement around the work that had been completed.

What we accomplished

To measure the outcomes of this launch, we worked backwards from our project goals and set up tracking using Mixpanel. The main thing we wanted to measure was an increase in usage of Stacking Plans from both a volume and unique user standpoint because it would give us directional measurement of an increase in active usage and product retention. With exporting being one of the biggest pain points, we also wanted to ensure that export usage was increasing as this would indicate more users were turning to our stacking plans rather than Excel.

70%

Increase in stacking plan usage

15%

Increase in monthly active users

100%

Increase in exports since launch

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Outcomes

From initial research to final iteration, the project took around 5 months (Oct '21 - Feb '22). In the end, we saw over a 50% increase in usage of our stacking plans from Feb to March and subsequent months. However more importantly, we made meaningful progress on our stated outcome of converting a significant count of users from manually creating stacking plans in Excel to using the stacking plan feature within our platform.
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