Tyler Fearns - ForRent.com iOS app Redesign

ForRent.com iOS App

ForRent.com had spent most of its development initiatives building and improving on their web experience. With mobile experiences becoming increasingly more relevant they decided to start an initiative to redesign and refresh their native apps. During this redesign I was in charge of the Android app while the iOS app was lead by someone else. After the release of the new apps we realized that the iOS app was not performing as well as the Android app. That’s when the project was handed over to me.

When I first received this project I spent my time understanding the insides and outs of the app. I reviewed the app myself, reviewed how others were using the app and talked to the old project manager and development team to understand the issues and successes they had throughout the project. I organized documents to define metrics that we would use to measure the success of the app. I then created a roadmap to illustrate how we plan on improving these metrics.

         The Process 
      

 Research I started by researching and beginning to understand where the app was falling short and what was causing it to perform badly.
 Document After I understood the shortcomings of the app I put documentation together to explain what we needed to improve to get the app up to speed. 
 Design One of the major issues with the app was that it didn’t receive the proper design love. I worked closely with an iOS designer to set design standards and to update each view within the app. 

 Gather User Feedback We implemented a user feedback form within the app and watched app reviews closely to understand what frustrations our users were having. Once we had some key issues we reacted to them quickly.
 Develop The second major issue with the app was how the app was structured. Development time was hindered by numerous code work around piled on-top of each other. During app improvement we put an emphasis on cleaning up the code base.
 Refine & Improve As we made improvements to the app I watched the metrics closely to see how the app improved with each release. 

After only a couple months of working on the app we saw a 30 % increase in daily active users and a 72% increase in conversions. While we continued to improve the user experience of the app we worked on cleaning the code base and improving app stability as well. This lead to the app having 99.89% crash free sessions.