Niido's current homepage
Introduction
After a getting settled in my internship at Momentum Design Lab I was put on my first official project; Niido Powered by Airbnb.
Niido has a unique business model within the sharing economy. It combines hotel-like units which the company rents out on Airbnb along with long-term leases within a single property. In addition, these long-term leasers are encouraged to Airbnb their own units for profit.
Providing amenities such as a conference rooms, cooking classes, smart lock systems and full cleaning services the value proposition for long-term residents is simply stated on the Niido website as...
"Make money living here"
How might we?
Our first Statement of Work was primarily research and exploration. First thing the team and I did was interview our primary point of contact Todd Butler, the CTO of Niido. We wanted to learn more about the current market, and what their ultimate business goals were.
We also received access to their software "Niido Hub." In the Hub the property team manages bookings, guest messages, long-term residents, cleaning schedules and events.
We conducted a market feature analysis, built sitemaps for the Hub and discovered these three major take aways
User Interviews, Flows and Their synthesis
From Todd we received a list of contacts for User Interviews consisting of property team members and corporate stakeholders alike. We explored their issues with the current Hub, learned more about their goals and general workflow. Here are some of the questions we asked..
During this time we created User Flows based off the current Niido Hub and our interviews to derive opportunities.
From mapping these user flows and synthesizing out User Interviews we defined these three key takeaways
Arch-types
After synthesizing the main take aways from our User Interviews we created three Arch-types. We decided on creating arch-types over personas because they are more malleable. If Niido succeeds in Saas-ing this product roles may change from property to property however, there will still be these following three users.
1. The Home Host - Tasked with operational management, they're the ones who are responsible for having units ready for the next check in. They monitor the Hub for new inquiries and answer any questions guests might have along the way.
2. The Master Host - A little more big picture, they work on getting long-term leasers to Airbnb their apartments and have more face to face interaction with guests and residents through hosting events they've personally planned. They also strategize with the corporate business development team to drive revenue further.
3. The Corporate - Not particulary a power user of the Hub however, they do monitor resident compliance, interact with Airbnb's point of contact when issues arise and adjust pricing and minimum stays for the units based on demand.
In addition, we visualized the current property ecosystem. Exploring how the users of the hub interact with each other along with other variables such as specialized maintenance, class instructors and the acquisitions department.
Client Workshop
With our synthesis done and our findings ready to present we attended a two day workshop at Niido's office in Miami. Our agenda included these exercises
What is a Design Workshop?
A quick overview of why we're here and what we hope to accomplish
Ice Breaker: 'Making it sexy'
Over and over the CEO Harvey has claimed he wants this product to be 'sexy.' How can we align on this phrase?
Five Year Vision
To better understand the business we had top stakeholders write their goals on Post-its and see how well it aligned with the rest of their team and our own findings
What could stop us?
Being open and aware of how things could go south allows use to better prepare for them
Who are we designing for?
Aligning their vision with our design to be better suit the power user's needs
How might we?
After discovering who we are designing for we asked stakeholders how we could possibly redesign the hub for the user's benefit
What's important here?
Within the current Hub there are over 20 dashboards of tabular data and we gotta know what to prioritize when it comes to the design phase
Storyboard a great experience
Recall a great experience with a digital product and tell us what you liked about it the most
Storyboard the future Niido Hub
In the future, what is the ideal workflow for our users?
After the Client Workshop was concluded we gathered our findings and proceeded to lay the ground work for our second statement of work .
