New Avenue Homes

The source of truth for New Avenue Homes remodels and ADU construction projects.

Technical Project Manager

I lead UI/UX design for the firm’s in-house project management app as a practicing architect and project manager with New Avenue.

I regularly conducted interviews and worked with the team and homeowners to identify problems and challenges with our workflows and tools then designed solutions for development and implementation. I also generated help sheets and other customer service resources and guided clients as we transitioned them to the new app.

We used Affinity apps, Figma, Shortcut, and Autopilot and regularly delivered updates, iterations and new features to customers.

Finances

Projects move smoother when contracts, approvals, and payments are all consolidated into a single source of truth.

Quotes broken down with clear descriptions

One interface combines budget, payments, and bills

Revisited Quotes

The differences in the interface for quotes, change orders and invoices caused accounting errors that added up. Designers and homeowners wanted better control of the breakdown and easy access to more detail.

Improvements to the formatting of the finances form, notes with formatting with markdown, and the introduction of file attachments sped up the review process of financial documents and reduced the need for customer calls and team meetings.

Improved Invoicing

Paying internal consultants relied heavily on manual payments and increased the burden on accounting. The payments workflow for customer invoices was adapted to paying for consultants and and new invoice interface was designed to accomodate the different types of invoices required by designers and builders while keeping the same simple format for customers to review, approve and pay.

This lead to the reduction of manual/check payments in the first 3 months by 70% and saved 50% of the accounting time for these payments.

File Center

The app was strong in finances and weak in communication. A new and easier to use file center brought the discussion online for design files and contracts and reduced the need for endless share links.

Less time searching for emails and shared Box links lead to fewer client meetings and reduced construction RFI’s (requests for information).

Files organized by tags and project phase with search and live preview for various file formats

The file center was integrated into invoicing, messaging, meetings/schedules and the project overview sections

Project Overview

Keeping an eye on a remodel or construction project as a homeowner is a big task. This section made that a lot easier by connecting all of the pieces together into a cohesive narrative and helped New Avenue’s leadership keep tabs on project progress.

Birds Eye View

View the project’s phases, meetings, finances and files all in one place. The new overview section was designed from user feedback and customized to serve the needs of designers, builders, and the homeowners as the team ensures details and tasks don’t get lost or forgotten.

Phase Detail

The app required users to visit various sections to see a complete picture of progress and resources for a given phase. Serving as a new home for the project, the phase detail pages are specifically designed for each phase and customizable by the project team to only show what is ready. Homeowners can approve phase completion here and jump to invoices, meeting minutes, contracts, files, and messages. The design elegantly connects to many of the features in the site to allow file upload/management, creation of invoices and enter in meeting minutes without bouncing around the app.

Feasibility Report

The Feasibility Report was the first custom report built to replace Google Docs andsimplified the process by automating some of the data collection and layout. Project designers can quickly start from a pre-populated template with live links to Google and Bing Maps and upload related files, code, and other project data. This information was formatted in a way that would be printable as a PDF and shared with permitting authorities to help speed up the approval process for new projects.

Contact Center

The magic of working with New Avenue was homeowners having a single contact for their whole project from design through construction. The contact center strengthened this by bringing designers, builders, clients and consultants into one place.

Project Team

Homeowners see their core team members in one interface with quick access to contact information. Consultants are listed below and include ways to pay their invoices within the app. This information wasn’t available before and invoices were previously issued and paid for manually.

Company Rolodex

All project contacts are visible by the in-house team to see who is on each project. By collecting consultants in the database, contacts can be added to new projects with a single click and finances behind the scenes are streamlined for accounting and automatic payments. Contacts can be shared with the whole New Avenue network building relationships with consultants leading to preferred vendor contracts and better pricing.

Contact Detail

Quickly gather details and see other projects contacts are on. Project teams no longer had to ask for recommendations and contact information and integrated invoicing by ACH or mailed check could be enabled and automated. A merge tool allowed for teams to add their consultants in and spend less time on data entry.