Screening felt overwhelming
Evaluating applicants was a high-stakes task without a clear process to lean on, making the experience stressful and time-consuming.
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Smart Screening was designed to help landlords move through tenant screening without feeling overwhelmed and compare applicants without losing the context they needed to make a decision.
Before moving into detailed interface design, I mapped the user flow to understand how landlords would move through the screening process. The flow helped identify where guidance was needed and where more advanced screening options could appear without interrupting the main path.
The beginning of the process was a natural moment to introduce screening options because the landlord was already making a setup decision.
Additional checks could appear again when a landlord moved from browsing candidates into evaluating one person more closely.
I explored two ways of presenting applicant information. The difference was not primarily visual. Each layout changed how much context a landlord could keep while moving from one candidate to another.
I presented both directions to the CMO and CEO, who reviewed them with the leasing team and landlords and brought the feedback back into the design process.
The preference for seeing the applicant list and full details at the same time made the split view the stronger direction. It matched how landlords wanted to compare people: move between candidates without repeatedly losing context.
I designed the interaction around pacing complexity rather than showing every choice at once. The goal was to keep landlords oriented through the screening process while making additional options available when they became useful.
Instead of one long form, onboarding was divided into focused screens with a visible progress indicator so landlords always knew where they were in the process.
Advanced screening options appeared when landlords were already making a related choice, keeping the main flow simpler without removing access to deeper evaluation.
The final experience kept the main path understandable while giving landlords enough depth to evaluate candidates more closely when needed. The interface was organized around reducing uncertainty rather than simply displaying more data.
Focused steps and visible progress helped make the setup process easier to follow without presenting everything at once.
Ranking and screening signals helped landlords identify applicants worth examining more closely without replacing their final judgment.
The split layout kept the applicant list available while full details changed alongside it, making movement between candidates more fluid.