SaaS Design

Transforming Innago Through Strategic Redesign: Five-Year Design Partnership Drives $4M Funding Boost, Skyrockets Customer Satisfaction

Innago’s mission is to create intuitive property management and tenant management software, addressing the challenges faced by small-to-mid-size landlords, enabling them to easily pick up, learn, and implement.

Impact we created Our design process

*Original designs were edited for confidentiality purposes

5 years (Ongoing)

Duration

Hudson, Ohio, USA

Location

PropTech

Industry

$4M

Funding Raised

Project Background

Some context about Innago

What is Innago?

Innago is a free, user-friendly property management software designed to streamline landlord tasks, including rent collection, tenant screening, property listing, work order management, application creation, lease signing, financial organization, and tenant communication.

The Challenge

Innago initially presented a comprehensive array of challenges encompassing both tenant and landlord aspects aimed at enhancing the overall property management experience. These included facilitating convenient online rent payments via credit card or ACH, simplifying autopay enrollment, providing access to past invoices and payments, enabling digital lease signing, document viewing, maintenance request submission, and fostering effective landlord-tenant communication. Prior to our collaboration, Innago grappled with challenges on both fronts: landlords struggled with manual processes, disjointed communication channels, and inefficient property management workflows, while tenants encountered difficulties with rent payments, lease management, and communication with their landlords.

Design Process

Our designers initiated the process with a series of product walk-through calls to gain domain knowledge, understand pain points, and address various UX challenges. Communication primarily occurred through voice/video calls, while Slack was utilized for chat-based interactions.

UX Audit

Heuristic evaluation led our designers to several significant improvement ideas. These actionable improvements aim to deliver quick wins.

User Flows

We built mutltple user flow diagrams based on different modules.

Sketches / Wireframes

Innago provided us with user stories accompanied by relevant data. Given the iterative nature of the process, dealing with a data-rich app and numerous moving parts, we presented various options to find a solution that could initiate meaningful conversations

Visual / UI Design

To enhance the visual appeal, we curated a mood board featuring colors and styles that best aligned with our vision of a user-friendly and delightful breathing interface for daily use.

Prototype / Interactions

Craft interactive design models, assess prototypes for a refined, user-friendly end product.

Design System

We meticulously organized the design system from scratch, ensuring its ongoing refinement in tandem with the evolving design process

Old Designs

Take a look at some of Innago's previous designs. These glimpses not only showcase a visual transformation but also highlight the evolution of the overall user experience.

In the following sections, we will delve into three key features of Innago's platform: ‘Property Detail’, ‘Documents & Files’, and ‘Messaging & Announcements’. While there are other features on the platform, we will focus on these three in detail to keep the case study concise and focused. Other features will be briefly summarized in the section labeled "Other features" following our discussion of these key features

Property Detail

The Property Detail Screen presented a challenge with its unorganized layout, making information consumption difficult. We carefully evaluated the relevance and utility of each component, focusing on landlords' needs.

Landlords needed to quickly scan vital information such as Rent Collection and Due Invoices, along with ongoing maintenance details and lease expiration. To address this, we streamlined the interface, ensuring essential information is clear and easily scannable.

One small yet impactful change was introducing a notification bar to alert landlords to urgent matters like documents ready for signing. Despite its seemingly minor nature, this feature has proven immensely useful, ensuring landlords remain responsive to critical issues.

Document & Files

The challenge at hand revolved around the complexity of lease structures, where a single lease could involve multiple tenants and each tenant might have multiple agreements. Furthermore, there was a need for improved visibility into the signing parties associated with each lease.
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we introduced a status widget to the UI, replacing a previous line-item display that lacked clarity on lease status and tracking

Additionally, recognizing the importance of confidentiality, we enhanced privacy measures. Users can now customize privacy settings to determine whether information should be shared with all roommates or restricted to specific tenants, ensuring secure collaboration.

We redesigned the lease creation interface with a user-centric approach in mind. By carefully organizing and prioritizing the fields, we created a streamlined workflow that guides users through the process effortlessly. The intuitive layout and clear labeling make it easy for users to input the necessary information and generate a lease document tailored to their specific requirements.

Messaging & Announcement

The "Messaging" feature in Innago was initially conceived as a simple chat tool for landlords and tenants. Recognizing its potential for greater utility, we proposed expanding its capabilities to allow users to perform essential tasks directly within the chat interface. Specifically, we suggested integrating functionalities for landlords to create invoices, maintenance requests, and leases seamlessly while engaging in conversations.

We provided rough sketches to illustrate the concept and collaborated closely with the client to explore its various use cases. This collaborative approach ensured that the feature met the specific needs of users while enhancing the overall user experience within the platform.
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After exploring various use cases together, we developed wireframes and high-fidelity user interface designs. These designs were meticulously crafted to ensure seamless integration of the proposed functionalities within the chat interface. Below, we present some of the designs that resulted from our collaborative efforts.

One significant challenge arose from the tedious process landlords faced when individually sending announcements to tenants. To address this, we focused on enhancing the user experience within the messaging platform by introducing an "Announcements" sub-feature. Drawing inspiration from the simplicity of social media feeds, we redesigned the interface to enable landlords to effortlessly broadcast messages to all tenants. This streamlined approach not only improves communication efficiency but also ensures prompt delivery of critical messages, ultimately fostering enhanced engagement between landlords and tenants.

Other Features

We've significantly improved the user experience across various features, including maintenance calendar, adding taxable entities, invoice payments, managing tenant details, income return deposits, integration options, global search, and multi-tenant assignment.

While we can't dive into all the details here, take a quick look below!

Maintenance Calendar

Schedule change at particular days

Add Taxable Entity

Before you can add a bank account to Innago you must first add a taxable entity.

Quick Actions

Bunch of actions allows you to manage all features

Pay Invoices

Allow user to pay all available invoices at one sight

Tenant Details

Allow tenant to manage their details & monitor their stats

Income Return Deposit

Allow users to make return deposit

Integration

Allow user to manage third party integration

Global Search Feature

Allow user to search globally inside Innago application

Assign Multiple Tenants

Innago helps to simplify your rental process with multiple tenants.

Flexible and Powerful

Let's start simplifying your rental process today.

Impact We Created?

What is Innago, and what did they achieve before working with Decojent?

$4M

Raised Funding

Innago raised $4M in funding Series B

350%

Growth with new
customer acquisition

Onboarded new customers who reviewed 4.9 on G2 and Capterra

They do high-quality work, they’re easy to get along with, and they have excellent design chops.

Dave Spooner

CEO

Innago being a large-scale application, maintaining consistency was paramount. To achieve this, we continually refined and update the design system. This involved defining rules for both visual and conditional consistency to ensure elements behaved predictably across different scenarios. These efforts were instrumental in delivering a seamless and user-friendly experience to the users.

Annotations

Allow user to search globally inside Innago application

Project Outcomes

What we deliver to client.

The Deliverable

Innago's platform underwent a transformation with our comprehensive design support and collaboration in Figma. We refined the user experience, streamlined interface design, and established a robust design system. Additionally, we provided a comprehensive component library for seamless implementation by developers.

Current Status

Continuing our collaboration, we're focused on enhancing the user experience of additional features within Innago's platform. Through ongoing design iterations and seamless integration, we aim to further elevate usability and functionality, ensuring the sustained success and innovation of Innago's offerings.

SaaS Design

Transforming Innago Through Strategic Redesign: Five-Year Design Partnership Drives $4M Funding Boost, Skyrockets Customer Satisfaction