End of tenancy experience redesign
The quick version
I redesigned the full end-of-tenancy experience at Flatfair — from how landlords and agents submit damage charges to how tenants negotiate and pay. The core design challenge: how do you make a high-stakes, emotionally charged process feel fair, clear, and fast for both sides?
My role: Product Designer. Research, workshops, wireframes, prototyping, usability testing. Core team: Product, engineering, customer support, end of tenancy operations, sales. Tools: Figma, Miro
Why this project exists
Flatfair replaces traditional rental deposits with a small check-in fee. When a tenancy ends, landlords or agents can submit charges for damages — tenants then negotiate or accept. Both sides of this process were broken. Agents submitted unlawful charges, missed deadlines, and made input errors. Tenants didn't understand how to negotiate, accepted charges by mistake, and couldn't be reached. Customer support was manually chasing tenants who never opened their emails and resolving disputes that better design could have prevented.
What research told us
I mapped the existing flow end to end, gathered customer support feedback, analysed usage data in Metabase and Hotjar recordings, and ran workshops with the end of tenancy team, stakeholders, and the sales team. I also interviewed agents directly.
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Agents were guessing. Some didn't know what to charge or what was reasonable — they guessed values, submitted duplicates, and added charges that should have been covered by separate insurance products. One agent submitted £9,999 for cleaning.
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Tenants couldn't find the negotiate button. It was easier to accept a charge than to negotiate — the negotiate action was buried on a details page with no guidance. Some tenants accepted charges by mistake with no way back.
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Timelines were invisible. Agents had 28 days to submit charges — this wasn't shown anywhere in the portal. Tenants didn't know their negotiation deadlines either. When deadlines passed, both sides were surprised.
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Nobody was reading the emails. Low open rates meant tenants missed charge notifications entirely. The customer support team spent significant time chasing responses.
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Two hypotheses were proven wrong. We assumed reducing negotiation time and limiting counter-offers would increase debt recovery. Neither did — what mattered was whether users understood the process.
Process preview
Charges creation: the agent side
The core problem: agents were submitting charges that were unlawful, unfair, or full of errors — creating liability for Flatfair and disputes for tenants.
The key design decision: block the mistake before it happens. Agents previously had no visibility into their 28-day submission deadline — so I added a dynamic timer that counted down at every step. Error validation stopped agents at critical points: duplicate charges, missing evidence, amounts that didn't add up. Tooltips explained what agents could legally charge and what was reasonable — educating at the moment of decision, not in a separate guide.
A finding from usability testing reshaped the flow entirely: one participant worried agents would enter only the balance remaining after insurance, not the full amount. Since we needed the full amount, I moved the insurance step to the end of the flow — a small reordering that prevented a systemic error.
Negotiation: the tenant side
Once charges are submitted, tenants need to respond — accept, negotiate, or escalate. The previous experience made accepting easy and negotiating nearly impossible to find.
The key design decision: make both actions equally visible and the consequences of each equally clear. I designed charges as separate cards with distinct states — pending action, pending landlord response, and agreed — so tenants always knew where they stood. The negotiate button sat alongside accept, not hidden behind a detail page.
Timers were redesigned from "X days left" to "You have X days to respond or charges will be accepted automatically" — making the consequence visible, not just the countdown.
I introduced SMS notifications alongside email to address the low open rate problem. The copy across the entire flow was reviewed with a copywriter — removing legal jargon, shortening emails, and making action buttons easier to find.
Testing and iteration
I ran four usability sessions for charges creation (with account managers) and five for negotiation (with potential tenants).
Charges creation: Optional vs required fields weren't clear enough — I standardised the labelling. Adding additional charges from the review page wasn't obvious — I added a clear edit button.
Negotiation: Users lacked instant feedback after accepting or negotiating — they didn't notice their charge moving to "Agreed." I added an empty "Agreed" section visible from the start so users understood where charges would move before they took action. The status box on desktop created visual noise without aiding any action — I removed it.
Learnings and outcomes
Key learnings
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Involve every team early — not just product. We didn't include sales initially and got critical insights mid-project that split the project in two. We'd scoped charges creation for both deposit alternatives and traditional deposits as one project — research revealed the strategies needed to be completely different. We descoped and focused, but lost time.
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Test the hypothesis, not just the interface. Two of our five hypotheses were proven wrong. Reducing negotiation time and counter-offers didn't improve debt recovery — understanding the process did. That redirected the entire design strategy toward education and clarity.
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Make the consequence visible, not just the action. The timer copy change, the confirmation modal before accepting, the repositioned insurance step — the most impactful design decisions were about preventing errors and making outcomes clear before users committed.
Outcomes
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Charges accepted by mistake dropped to zero after adding the confirmation modal — the single clearest metric from the project.
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Customer support time on negotiation queries decreased by 15% — users could find the negotiate button, understood timelines, and had access to help centre content without contacting support.
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Data collection from agents doubled — making key documents mandatory increased submission rates by 100%, reducing Flatfair's risk exposure on future claims.
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Plans closed without charges rose from 5% to 10% within three months of the updates — a direct signal that the clearer process was reducing unnecessary disputes.
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No more charges submitted for tenants still in the property — the moving-out date check eliminated a recurring operational problem.
