Designing a product that handles real-world conversations

Notify helps property teams manage resident communication at scale. I designed flows and interfaces that balanced automation with clarity — making complex, high-volume communication easier for staff to manage and easier for residents to understand.

The Challenge

Resident communication sounds simple until it isn’t.

Early on, the product focused on maintenance emergencies — routing urgent issues to on-call staff and keeping a record inside the system. But as the platform evolved, the need got much bigger. Property teams needed a better way to text residents, send urgent property-wide updates, communicate from their phones, support multiple languages, and keep a usable record of what happened.

The challenge was designing a system that could handle all of that without becoming confusing or training-heavy. Property managers were rarely sitting at a desk with time to study documentation. They needed tools that felt familiar, worked quickly on mobile, and made it easy to communicate clearly in the moment — especially during time-sensitive situations like outages, maintenance emergencies, or building-wide alerts.



Accessibility mattered here too. Written communication and multilingual support were not “nice to have” features. They were core to making the product more usable and more inclusive for the people relying on it.

The Idea

Design resident communication to feel as intuitive as the tools people already use every day — especially their phones.

I helped shape flows for resident texting, contact management, tagging, segmentation, language preferences, mass communication, and conversation tracking. The goal was to make the system feel familiar enough that property staff could pick it up quickly, while still giving them the structure they needed to communicate at scale.

A big part of that work was multilingual communication. Residents could be tagged with a preferred language, and outgoing messages could be automatically translated, helping teams send maintenance updates, safety alerts, and everyday notices more clearly across language barriers.

We also built around urgency. Mass calling gave teams a way to reach selected residents or groups quickly for things like water shutoffs, parking notices, and late-rent reminders, while nightly PMS integrations helped keep resident data current. 

On top of that, I helped think through how automated outreach should work through Lou — including scheduled calls for things like late rent, renewals, move-ins, move-outs, and maintenance follow-ups — and how those interactions should be documented in a way that gave teams both a clear high-level view and a useful path into the details.

A lot of my UX thinking here came down to one question:
How do we make complex communication feel obvious?

The Result

The result was a resident communication experience built for real-world use: mobile, fast, multilingual, and easier to understand without loads of training.

Property teams could text individuals or groups, communicate in residents’ preferred languages, send urgent mass calls, and manage communication on the go. That mattered because many of the people using the product were not parked at a desk — they were moving through properties, responding to issues, and trying to keep residents informed in real time.

This work also helped push the product toward better accessibility and better clarity. Language preferences became part of the workflow. Written communication became easier to reference. Dashboards and records were designed to give teams quick overviews without losing the ability to drill into specific conversations when needed.



The broader communication approach also aligned with best practices the team later published: use the right channel for the situation, make texting two-way, translate critical alerts, personalize messages when possible, and keep communication short, clear, and easy to act on.