2023
Operto — Automating Property Management
At Operto, I spent eight months designing for property managers, operations teams, and guests across our Guest and Connect products.
I collaborated with PMs, engineers, and customer‑facing teams to understand how automation, access, and communication show up in day‑to‑day operations. From there, I focused on simplifying key journeys, like check‑in, access, and guest messaging, so that automation felt invisible and stays felt seamless.
Contribution
Tools
Timeline
Understanding the whole product journey
From GTM to Customer success
To help me understand the full journey from go‑to‑market to customer success, my design lead and I led a series of design‑led research sessions with property managers and internal teams.
I used interviews, product walkthroughs, and lightweight ethnographic methods at hotel and rental properties to uncover where our tools supported real‑world workflows…and where they broke down. Throughout the project, I brought stakeholders into working sessions, using sketches and prototypes to align sales, CS, and product on what customers valued at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Final deliverable
Guest Portal Builder
Before this project, one of the biggest pain points we heard from customers and internal teams was how hard it was to set up custom pages in the app that guests see. Property managers and hotel staff found the existing builder unintuitive and time‑consuming, often escalating simple content changes to our marketing and customer success teams. Those teams were spending valuable time hand‑building pages, so I worked closely with them and our customers to rethink the Page Builder experience.
For our Page Builder, I partnered closely with our developers to ensure our ambitious UX ideas were balanced with real technical constraints. We iterated through multiple versions, adjusting interaction patterns and component behavior as we learned more about performance, edge cases, and implementation limits. Before release, I collaborated with PMs and QA to define test scenarios, run usability sessions with customers, and refine the final flows so property managers could ship updates confidently without additional support.
Our impact: As my co-op ended prior to the launch of this product I was only able to view the early usability sessions. Those sessions showed faster setup times and fewer mistakes when creating pages. Feedback from customers and internal teams suggests the new builder is easier to learn, with fewer support questions about basic configuration.
*Image was altered using AI to protect assets designed for Samsung. Please reach out to learn more about the flows and prototypes I've designed.
Note to self (and to others)
Personal reflection
Avoiding design debt with data-driven design.
I have gained invaluable knowledge during my internship, attributable not only to the guidance received from seasoned designers but also to the insights gained from the challenges faced by various teams and colleagues. Among the considerable challenges inherent to startups, managing technical debt stood out as one of the most challenging one, and this issue was no different at Operto.
Rather than exclusively focusing on launching features tailored to a limited subset of users, we shifted our perspective to address the root causes and issues hindering the majority of our user base. This transformation involved extensive communication with our customer success team and direct engagement with our customers. We also conducted thorough examinations of data collected through FullStory and Google Analytics, in addition to rigorous user testing conducted prior to development. I learned that in the realm of design, it is not merely important to craft effective solutions, but it is imperative to do so in a data-driven manner.
Communicating designs to non-designers.
During my time at FORM (my previous internship) I was introduced to Toastmasters, and the thought of public speaking was nerve-wracking and uncomfortable for me. When I joined at Operto, I knew I had to continue challenging myself and find another uncomfortable environment, yet applicable situation to practice public speaking. I’ve led design hand-offs previously and was familiar with communicating with software developers/engineers, but rarely had the chance to communicate design process and demos with other teams.
Thus, I requested to present my projects to different sets of stakeholders, and later found myself taking a significant leap by presenting in bi-weekly product demos to the whole company. Comparing my experience with Toastmasters to presenting design concepts, I discovered several differences; presenting design processes and rationale to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds demanded more extensive preparation and a deeper understanding of how to establish connections and craft a narrative that resonated with their specific fields of expertise.
