Deepesh Sudhakar
DEEPESH
SUDHAKAR
SUDHAKAR
MS HCI- IoT Design for Business Innovation
Formative Research
Competitive Analysis
Concept Design (Adobe XD)
UX Strategy
How might we enable short-term rental (AirBnB, VRBO) hosts to manage & monitor seamless access to their properties and improve guest ratings & reviews overall?
How might we enable short-term rental (AirBnB, VRBO) hosts to facilitate & monitor seamless access to their properties while also providing them with a software solution that helps hosts manage their vacation rental business and improve guest ratings & reviews overall?
Shortly After Our pitch for joint venture or acquisition of IOT Cloud integration platform, Allegion acquired a privately held technology company Yonomi.
In order to understand the current business landscape for Schlage and to better design for the stakeholders we conducted Industry research and created an environmental map. We felt that creating an environmental map would give us an holistic view to understanding the market requirement, to move to creating good products.
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Insights from our environmental assessment
During this research phase we got to interview product managers from Schlage and also Airbnb.
We created a proto-persona. Unlike the standard persona, proto-personas are based on the assumptions of the stakeholders, and further checked against actual data. They are a collection of heuristics, market research, and intuition presenting an opportunity to articulate the target audience, their needs, and behaviors. They ultimately represent what we think our users are like.
Based on the proto-persona "Amy", we created an empathy map for analysis, to better understand user needs and pain points.
● Needs access and property management
● Maintain records and history
● Need simple Access control
● Wants easy to use property management software
● Needs reliable connectivity
● Guest satisfaction
● Customized guest experiences
● New softwares for property management
● Smart Remote locks
● Accessing property is complicated
● Traditionally Manage property
● Provide access to property
● Provide assistance to guests
● Hire service or take help for installation
● New home technologies ex: Smart home control, smart locks
● Guests wanting simpler home access methods
● People using property management softwares to track maintain
● Property owners offering unique services
● Easy to use access and property management
● Remote management
● High property rental ratings
● Property and access management
● Not too tech savvy
● Property maintenance
● Assisting guests
How might we enable short-term rental (AirBnB, VRBO) hosts to facilitate & monitor seamless access to their properties while also providing them with a software solution that helps hosts manage their vacation rental business and improve guest ratings & reviews overall?
We used the data from the user data analysis and research insights to understand the customer's jobs. And used this information to generate concepts for a solution.
Much to our surprise while designing these concepts, we realized that there are already multiple platforms with these features integrated. And these Solutions already exist. We decided that designing a platform with these features would only add to the list of existing property management tools.
We discussed our findings with our clients and they wanted us to explore this venue of property management platforms. From our initial findings we realized that property management tools cater to a list of pain points for rental property hosts and wanted to understand the different features they offer. We found the top players in the short term rental property management and did a competitive analysis on the features they offered.
We found that Guesty is an up and coming Property Management Service (PMS) platform and it offers most of the services that rental property owners need and also integrates other API's for the services It lacks. We recommend that using this platform, would solve most of the customer's problem. Hence, we did a deep dive into the Guesty's products and the company itself.
●Since2013
●Walnut, CA
●232employees
●Private
●Total funding: $64M (2019)
●Est.Annual Revenue: $100K-5.0M
●Est.Valuation: appx. $180M (2019)
On doing a deep dive into Guesty we found that the central means of integrating smart locks on to the platform is through the use of other home access/automation integration platforms such as Lynx and RemoteLock. Since, the primary objective of these platforms is to provide access, this aligns with Allegion's requirement to create SaaS/SaaP.
Since, Platforms like Guesty, Lynx and RemoteLock are already established in this marketspace and have a large customer base, creating a platform to solve short term rental host's problem would be like reinventing the wheel. Hence from our analysis we suggest acquisition or joint venture to be the best possible direction for Allegion. To give you a breakdown on how acquisition or joint venture would be beneficial, lets look at the following.
Almost all Property Management Service platforms currently go through RemoteLock or Lynx to provide remote access to the property, giving the customers the ability to unlock doors and control other IOT devices.
● “Intermediary’ between lock manufacturers &the clients
● Integrates & updates its services with RL &Lynx packages
● Charges the lock manufactures fee for using its software
● Becomes a major player by controlling the channel of communications
Since acquisition or joint venture would give the operation control to Allegion, Schlage would be the parent company enclosing platforms like Guesty, RemoteLock and Lynx. Since each of these platforms offer separate subscription options, Integration would bring all platform customers to a centralized point, which is Schlage.
Having one unified platform increases the trust on the brand in turn bringing more customers.
Having the control of integration platforms like RemoteLock and Lynx as well as amazing native smart locks, opens platforms like Airbnb to integrate lock access directly onto their platform. Since, Allegion had mentioned their talks with Airbnb during our interview, we took Airbnb as an example to see how this feature would work.
Acquisition or joint venture would ideally drive all access control through Allegion. It is most beneficial for users for property access. More so for property managers with multiple property and works best when integrated along with platforms such as Guesty.
Since integrating lock access directly on short term rentals is a feature most Hosts look forward to, locking in this access on any one platform would open the path for other platforms.
Once we have locked in these platforms, we could use these platforms to market the service and also for the customers of these platforms, we can incentivize them to join or subscribe to other platforms that Schlage chooses to acquisition or joint venture in a cross-marketing format.
For this whole model to work, firstly Allegion would need to acquisition or joint venture with smart access platforms and/or property management platforms. Secondly, create or port APIs for lock integration. And finally, integrate into short term rental platforms.
Most importantly, not all problems can be solved by a new application. Working on this project has helped me grow as a Product Designer. I learned a lot of things working on this project. I learned to balance the business needs as well as the end users requirement. I learned to use multiple business models to check for the fit. Namely, Value Proposition Canvas, Business Model Canvas, Environmental map, SWOT Analysis.
