New service, new workflow

BoutiqueHomes is a vacation home rental company. They have built their reputation on curating a collection of architectural gems for a clientele with good taste. As their collection grew, they added features to create customized property listing pages. These features, however, were added without consideration to the user experience of the internal team.

One of the newest features they wanted to add was the ability to split a property into multi-units. This new feature demanded an overhaul of the current system. In my role as UX Designer, I was asked to redesign the backend interface to allow multi-units to be published on the website as well as optimize the internal workflow.

Team interviews

Redesigning a system to accommodate a new service and better support employees was a major undertaking not only design wise, but for the internal team as well. Many of them have grown accustomed to the system—meaning this redesign would be a change to their routines.

Fortunately, the team expressed excitement for the forthcoming change and were enthused to provide their feedback during the design process. After discussions with the stakeholder and interviews with employees, a strategy was developed.

From sketches to handoff

After a series of user research methodologies and interviews with the developer, I transformed my initial sketches into clickable prototypes for usability testing. Findings from this test allowed me to iterate the design, receive the go ahead, and prepare the final handoff for programmers.

The result

This redesign transformed a list of unknown and obsolete features into a backend interface that supports both a new service and employee efficiency. A design built on resuable components allows for faster creation of new pages, an updated sitemap makes it easier for employees to find information faster, and intuitive behind-the-scenes functions significantly reduces mental resources and ultimately prevent errors.