LittleBird is a smart home automation and access application that allows residents of apartment communities to provide guests with access to their living communities and apartment units. The LittleBird mobile app’s interface for sharing access credentials with guests was an overwhelming and confusing single-screen interface.
Based on feedback and interviews with apartment residents and property managers, we identified key pain points in the user flow to provide guests with access to their residential communities. In addition to gathering insight from users, we analyzed the interface and flow of competing applications to see what was successful and unsuccessful about their approach to providing residents with guest access.
Using the information I had gathered, I broke down the process of granting guest access into simple steps that apartment residents could easily understand. The guest access user experience was now a simplified mult-step setup wizard that made granting access easier. However, as I realized the solution to a simplified guest access experience, the development team notified us that they were working with limited development resources and could only make front-end changes to the user interface. This change sent us back to the drawing board as some changes I’d hoped to implement were no longer possible.
With the current backend restrictions in mind, I redesigned the step-by-step guest access wizard. In the next sprint of the design process, I needed to design a way for residents to edit the access period and type of previously added guests. Among the design team, there was debate about the best approach to the editing flow. At first, it might be beneficial to send users through the entire flow with the ability to change guest access settings at each step. While this was a more streamlined process, it was argued that it forced users through unnecessary steps. Ultimately, we designed an interface where users could adjust settings as needed without navigating through the entire guest access scheduling flow.
