Insulae
Insulae is a modern platform designed to simplify rental management for landlords and tenants, addressing common pain points like manual bill collection and the complexity of rent-splitting in shared flats. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Roman “insulae” — apartment buildings that housed citizens of varying backgrounds — this project is built to streamline daily rental tasks, such as payment processing and utility management, while balancing the needs of all parties involved.
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Many landlords face challenges in rental management, including manual bill collection and tracking rent payments. In our research, over 57% of surveyed landlords expressed frustration, particularly around managing utility bills, which often required significant manual work and led to inefficiencies.
For tenants, delayed invoices frequently result in lump-sum payments, especially in shared flats, where splitting rent can become a contentious issue. This causes friction and complicates relationships, with tenants often feeling overwhelmed by communication about utilities managed by the landlord.
Platforms like Cozy, Buildium, AppFolio, Rentec Direct, and TenantCloud offer comprehensive property management features, including rent tracking, maintenance scheduling, and financial reporting. However, they are primarily designed for larger residential and commercial properties, lacking specialized tools for rent-splitting in shared housing.
Insulae focuses on automating rent-splitting and simplifying communication between landlords and tenants, catering specifically to shared flats. By automating invoicing and receipt generation, Insulae provides a balanced solution that addresses the needs of both parties, while also centralizing accounting data.
Through over 70 surveys and interviews, both landlords and tenants expressed dissatisfaction with current systems due to inefficiencies and poor communication tools.
Manual Processes: Landlords often send utility bills manually and wait for payments, which can be time-consuming.
Delays in Rent Payments: These delays are a major frustration for both parties, making reconciliation difficult.
Communication Overload: Tenants feel overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of communications, especially when bills are managed through the landlord.
Automation: An automatic system for utility bill collection and distribution could significantly reduce manual workload.
Notifications: Regular alerts for both rent and utilities could help streamline communication and reduce confusion.
Online Platforms: Centralized payments, bills, and communications could enhance transparency and reduce errors.
From this research, our priority became automating rent collection and bill generation, and simplifying rent-splitting for shared flats, ensuring clarity and ease of use for all parties.
Early wireframes focused on the landlord and tenant dashboards, providing a clear overview of essential data such as income, expenses, and payment history. We developed a basic structure that emphasized simplicity and transparency.
Before moving to the high-fidelity stage, we incorporated user feedback to improve navigation and registration flows, ensuring that the platform was intuitive for both landlords and tenants.
Landlords can link their utility provider accounts to the app for automatic invoicing. This feature helps improve transparency for tenants and reduces the landlord’s workload. Monthly rent and bill collections are streamlined, making the process seamless for both parties.
The app includes a centralized dashboard where landlords and tenants can track payments, expenses, and revenues at a glance. It also features a section for managing house issues, allowing both parties to monitor and resolve problems efficiently.
An incidence management dashboard was included to streamline communication and track issues like maintenance requests. Both landlords and tenants can easily keep up with the status of reported problems.
The term Insulae comes from the blocks of flats in Ancient Rome that were rented out to citizens who could not afford private dwellings. Our aim was to take inspiration from this historical concept and reimagine it for the present-day rental market, providing a modern, structured approach to shared housing management.
We developed a design system that maintains consistency across screens while allowing for future scalability. This system took into account not only digital aspects of the brand but also potential physical elements, such as branded documents and forms that could be used by landlords and tenants.
Detailed documentation of the design systems, components, and screens ensured that the product was implemented accurately in production, maintaining visual and functional consistency.
During the ideation process, many ideas emerged, making it challenging to decide which to prioritize. We used prioritization frameworks like MOSCOW and Urgency-Effort matrices to select the most critical features to design first. This experience underscored the importance of prioritization and focus, helping us deliver a solution that met the key needs of our users.
This project also highlighted the complexity of rental management and the value of a user-centric approach in tackling seemingly small problems that, when addressed, can significantly improve the user experience.
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