Background
Founded in 2003, LeaseAccelerator has helped the Forbes Global 2000 to get compliant with new lease accounting standards and take control of their leasing process.
LeaseAccelerator acquired Real Estate Management(REM) and EZLease in 2019 and early 2020, conducted a global re-branding campaign and hired me as first User Experience Director in the company’s history.
By prioritizing customer input as the basis for design decisions we built the culture from the ground up making user experience the business of engineering, marketing and sales.
Problems
The user experience challenges for the company were many, but at a high level:
LeaseAccelerator’s lease accounting platform is feature rich and powerful, but hard to use, requiring lots of expensive customer support.
User-centered design had not been a foundational principal for developing the platform. Over more than a decade, customer-requested features had been bolted on creating inconsistent navigation, styling, and chaotic workflows. Back-end code base needed restructuring making global interface changes difficult.
LeaseAccelerator Enterprise Edition, the company’s flagship, had received very low NPS(Net Promoter Score), especially for user experience issues.
“Hard to use” “Clunky interface” “UI needs to be updated.”
EZLease was written in Microsoft Visual Studio and had to be delivered through an AWS Appstream wrapper, creating a cumbersome user experience and competitive disadvantage.
REM came with a dated but reasonably well organized navigation system and consistency of workflows. REM needed brand integration with LeaseAccelerator.
Objectives
Increase renewals by raising the NPS for LeaseAccelerator Enterprise Edition by delivering an improved user experience.
Raise the competitive advantage of EZLease by developing a UX design strategy to transition the platform to the cloud.
Improve the customer value in LeaseAccelerator Enterprise by seamlessly integrating REM functionality and work- flows.
Research
We established recurring feedback channels with our customers and within our company to gain insights that would drive design innovations.
Stakeholder Interviews
1:1 customer interviews to better under- stand their UX issues using the Lease- Accelerator Enterprise and EZLease platforms.
1:1 internal interviews with customer support, success, and sales teams.
Workshops
Customer workshops with 10+ customers at a time. In these workshops we walk through design prototypes, upcoming changes, and have open discussions about individual customer’s workflows. Activities included card sorting, journey mapping and user persona definition.
Design
The insights we gain from our research informed our design decisions. We created a standardized process for UX documentation and delivery with engineering. Inserted user experience design as a required resource and component of the Agile development methodology.
Coordinating with marketing we established style guidelines for colors, fonts and affordances in rebrand of LeaseAccelerator and EZLease.
Navigation, information architecture, and workflows were re-structured for both LeaseAccelerator and EZLease.
Real Estate Management was rebranded to align with LeaseAccelerator integration.
Customer home dashboards were designed for LeaseAccelerator and EZLease.
Usability and Validation
To validate new designs for the multiple platforms, usability tests were conducted using interactive prototypes.
Moderated usability tests were conducted with customers.
Unmoderated tests were conducted using Userfeel.com.
Outcomes
Design thinking was established as the core of product development strategy by focusing on customer input as the guiding principle for improved user experience.
Design changes directly contributed to increasing LeaseAccelerator’s NPS score by 50 points.
A design strategy was developed for EZLease to migrate out of Appstream to the Cloud.
Design solutions for 1 gazillion feature improvements across platforms were researched, designed, tested and released.
