Tenanticle

Role: Product Designer (UI/UX)

Platform: Mobile App (iOS & Android)

Industry: PropTech

Overview

Tenanticle is a property management mobile app built to bring landlords, property managers, and tenants onto a single digital platform. As lead Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end UI/UX process, from early discovery through to final UI handoff; for the core mobile experience covering rent collection, maintenance requests, lease management, and tenant-landlord communication. The product needed to feel as comfortable to a property manager juggling dozens of units as it did to a first-time tenant paying rent from their phone for the first time.

The Goal

The goal was to design a mobile experience that could replace the patchwork of phone calls, spreadsheets, and paper records most property managers were relying on, with a single tool that made day-to-day operations faster and more transparent. For property managers, that meant a clear view of every unit, tenant, and payment status at a glance. For tenants, it meant an easy way to pay rent, log a repair issue, and track the status of both without chasing anyone down.

The Problem

Property management, especially across smaller and mid-sized portfolios, is still largely manual. Rent gets tracked in spreadsheets or notebooks, maintenance requests get lost in WhatsApp threads, and tenants often have no visibility into their payment history or lease terms. This creates friction and mistrust on both sides: property managers lose hours to admin instead of growing their portfolio, and tenants are left guessing whether their last payment or repair request was even received. Early interviews surfaced this as the single biggest source of tension in the landlord-tenant relationship.

The Solution

We designed Tenanticle around three core workflows: payments, maintenance, and communication. Property managers get a portfolio-level dashboard showing occupancy, payment status, and open maintenance tickets across all their properties. Tenants get a simplified home screen built around their lease; pay rent, log an issue, message their manager, view documents, with no digging required. Every action on one side surfaces as a clear status change on the other, so neither party has to ask "did you get that?"

The Design Approach

I started with structured interviews across both sides of the market; property managers, leasing agents, and tenants, to map how rent collection and maintenance actually happened day to day, not how the business assumed it happened. From there I built user flows for the highest-friction moments (paying rent, logging an emergency repair, renewing a lease) and tested low-fidelity wireframes with both user groups before moving to high-fidelity UI. Because the app needed to work reliably on lower-end devices and inconsistent connections, I designed every flow with lightweight screens and offline-friendly states in mind, and built a component library early so the team could ship new features without reinventing patterns each time.

Visual Direction

The visual language needed to read as trustworthy and calm, this is a product people use to handle their rent money and their home. I leaned on a cool, confident palette of deep blues and greens against a clean neutral background, with a single accent color reserved for actions that need attention, like an overdue payment or an open ticket. Status is communicated visually first; color and iconography; so a property manager scanning a long list of units can tell what needs attention without reading every line. Typography stays simple and highly legible, prioritizing clarity over personality.

Key Features

• Portfolio dashboard with at-a-glance occupancy and payment status

• In-app rent payments with digital receipts and automatic reminders

• Maintenance ticketing with photo attachments and status tracking

• Document vault for leases and notices

• Direct in-app messaging between tenants and managers

  
  

The Outcome

Tenanticle gave property managers a single place to run their portfolio instead of five disconnected tools, and gave tenants a level of transparency they hadn't had before. Internally, the component library and documented flows became the foundation other features were built on, which sped up later design work considerably. It's one of the case studies I point to most often when talking about designing for operational, B2B-style products rather than pure consumer apps.

Reflections & Key Takeaways

This project taught me how much trust is tied to small interface details; a clear receipt, a visible status badge, in a product that touches people's money and their home. It also reinforced the value of designing for the realities of your users' devices and connectivity rather than the best-case scenario. If I revisited it today, I'd push harder for early usability testing with tenants specifically, since most of our early research time skewed toward the property manager side.