The Leo Trippi back of house team requested a replacement for their legacy admin system for managing property details and availability inventory. The top level brief was to create a more accessible admin design; adding functionality to speed up back of house tasks, and reduce erroneous information being input.

Discovery

Leo Trippi is a growing company with a growing administration staff, therefore the platform needed to be easily understood by new employees. Rather than take the usual user interview route, my process was to take the role of a new user, firstly by trying to use the existing platform with zero onboarding, documenting where flows were broken, what could be improved etc. Then, asking for help from my ‘colleagues’. Both my experience and the admin team’s explanation was then used to facilitate conversations with other users and the CTO.

Key Insights & Challenges

• UI: The legacy platform’s UI was “too small”, “ugly”, “confusing”, “old”, “didn’t feel like part of the company”. 

• Users: Several of the users had mild visual impairments. Users often became lost in the system, especially when returning to the system after taking a break.  

• Exporting data: Data within the platform needed to be exported to RTF and PDF in various forms. The current system was laborious.   

• Find / Search / Filter: The current filters were incredibly difficult to use, and results exceeding 20 were cumbersome to compare. 

• Changing data laborious, error prone: Changing data for several weeks needed to be possible, but mistakes were too easily made and impossible to track.  

• Alleviating confusion: Rebuilding a legacy system which had been used company-wide for more than a decade meant users needed to be able to use the new system from day one.

• Development: Onboarding and managing a third-party development team who had zero experience of the industry.  

• Release scheduling: Facilitating the conversation and release schedule for key features with several users with various access rights. 

• Financial: budgeting time allocation to a fixed monthly cost.

Approach

• Stake-holder and inhouse developer interviews and collaboration sessions.

• Deep dive into existing legacy platform.

• Stakeholder interviews and several weekly calls during each feature development.  

• Research of Material Design principles (the team used Drive and Gmail so a similar functionality was easily understood). 

• Wireframing of several user journeys for core features. 

• Building a comprehensive prototype in Invision for discussing, testing, and sign-off. 

• Converting Material design to in-house styles such as the use of Helvetica.

• Researching various products using complex search and filtering systems, PDF export solutions, and products with status change functions.

Solution

• Simplified and brighten the UI for better legibility and a less aggressive palette.

• Increased the size of typography

• Entirely overhauled the export functions, allowing for more logical and simultaneous multiple export to PDF, Text, RTF.

• Overhauled the change system, incorporating multi-date changes, more obvious change of state creation, and introduced a version history feature.

• Redesigned search, filter, sort, and pagination

• Redesigned the calendar search

• Introduced a pin system allowing users to fix properties they were offering or working on to the top of the directory.

• Refined comments flags.

• Introduced a show / hide status to the colour system.

• Redesign PDF export-from-data brochure