Designing for Enterprise

 

  • Role: UI/UX designer in-house at Investor Management Services (IMS)
  • Context: 60 employees / 2 designers
  • Duration: 1 year, September 2016 - November 2017

 

Introduction

Investor Management Services (IMS) is a software application that helps commercial real estate owners manage their investors, amounting to over $16B in equity. I joined in September of 2016, tasked with value-add general usability improvements and product feature design. In my year at IMS, it more than doubled its annual revenue from $1M to $2.5M. 

The Challenge

How could we grow our feature base while holding the line for usability and modern practices? As a first-mover into the industry, we also faced the unique challenge of growing the commercial real estate tech industry from the ground up, with no examples to follow. What would that look like?

Process

My first steps was always to define requirements based on user feedback and meetings with stakeholders and subject matter experts. 

Once requirements were defined, I would begin concepting designs, with prototypes to present to the company and iterate from.

After usually several iterations, I would have a finalized design with documentation to handoff to our developers. I would then work with the dev and QA team through implementation, testing alongside them.

Initiatives/Accomplishments

Creating a culture for design inspiration

  • Maintained library of resources for design inspiration

  • Gave biweekly design talks

Advocating for modernity in design

  • Pursued side projects in UI enhancements that led to an overhaul of the entire app UI
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Creating marketing materials (for print and web) as well as email content

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Creating onboarding materials to guide users through an application

Owned the design for the first mobile application in CRE tech

Presented design/usability concepts for future consideration

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