DVORA LIVING

Dvora runs premium residential buildings in Jersey City for more than 500 active residents, and the app is the product: cleaning, check-ins, reservations, payments, lease processes. Move-out was the one flow nobody had designed. Residents could not find where it started, could not tell what was already done, and finished half the steps in their email client.

Every gap landed on the property managers, who confirmed payments by hand, chased documents and rescheduled inspections residents had missed. Dvora estimated the drag at $7,500 to $10,000 a month in delayed apartment turnover. I joined as a UX/UI intern with one brief: streamline the exit.

A heuristic evaluation surfaced the interface problems. Ten 30-minute remote interviews, five residents and five property managers, surfaced the process ones. App Store reviews gave me a third version, the one users write when nobody from Dvora is listening.

The old journey ran ten steps and three of them were retries. Residents searched on mobile, failed, switched device, paid, received no confirmation, then called a manager to find out whether it had worked.

Documents left the app and never came back. Forms arrived by email with no in-app notification, so signing meant print, sign, scan, and wait for someone to confirm by hand.

Both sides were blind to the same thing. Residents did not know which step they were on. Managers did not know who had completed what. That one missing state generated the repetitive emails, the missed inspections and the delayed exits.

Three design opportunities came out of it: process visibility, automation gaps, reminders and alerts.

Each opportunity became a layer of the redesign.

Process visibility. A three-step tracker, Payment, Signature, Appointment, present on every screen, so residents see their position and managers see it live instead of asking.

Automation gaps. Payment returns an instant downloadable receipt. Signing happens in the app with drawn, typed, uploaded or saved signature options, which closes the print and scan loop.

Reminders and alerts. Calendar sync for resident and manager, add-to-calendar on confirmation, and a reminder 24 hours before the inspection, the step that used to restart the whole process.

• Kept every step inside the app, with no email fallback anywhere in the flow.
• Reduced move-out to the three steps the business actually requires, and cut the rest.
• Replaced generic labels like "Save" with the action each button performs, after the heuristic pass showed they caused most of the hesitation.
• Agreed one pattern set with design, engineering and product stakeholders so the same flow could ship on iOS, Android and web.

A survey three months after implementation showed a 60% increase in resident satisfaction in internal testing, and 35% higher efficiency measured by the drop in calls, emails and delays reaching the management team. Move-out and its tracking now run 100% digital.

I then worked with the design team, product stakeholders and developers to finalise the UI guidelines and roll the flow out consistently across iOS, Android and web.