APT Pay — Design Case Study

Project Overview

The future of property payments — designed from scratch

APT Pay is a B2B SaaS platform built for property management companies. At the time of engagement, the product had strong backend infrastructure but lacked the user experience to match its technical ambitions.

Property managers were navigating fragmented workflows across spreadsheets, legacy portals, and disconnected payment tools. Residents experienced friction at every touchpoint — from application to monthly rent, maintenance requests to move-out refunds.

My mandate was clear: redesign the entire product experience. Build a cohesive design system. Create interfaces that felt as premium and trustworthy as the payments flowing through them.

Months of Research & Design

240+

Component Screens Designed

Core Platform Surfaces

Unified Design System Built

The Problem

Complexity hiding behind outdated interfaces

APT Pay's platform handled millions in transactions, yet felt like software from a decade prior. User interviews surfaced consistent pain points across every persona.

🏗️

Fragmented Workflows

Property managers switched between 4–6 disconnected tools to complete a single leasing cycle. No unified data, no shared context.

💳

Trust Deficit in Payments

Residents reported anxiety around digital rent payments. Vague confirmation states, no audit trail visibility, unclear status messaging.

📊

Zero Data Visibility

Finance teams lacked real-time cash flow dashboards. Reporting was manual, error-prone, and always a day behind reality.

📱

No Mobile Experience

Residents expected a native-quality mobile app. The existing solution was a broken responsive port that failed on most devices.

🔒

Compliance Complexity

FINTRAC and PCI-DSS requirements created visual noise. Disclosure-heavy flows scared off users at critical conversion moments.

⚡

Performance Perception

Slow-loading, unoptimized screens made users second-guess whether their payment had gone through — leading to duplicate submissions.

Design Question

"How might we make complex financial transactions feel as simple and trustworthy as sending a text message?"

Design Process

Research-led, iteration-driven

Every decision was grounded in evidence. I ran generative and evaluative research in parallel with design — keeping the team aligned and moving fast without cutting corners.

Discovery & Research

Conducted 14 stakeholder interviews across property managers, residents, and finance teams. Built journey maps exposing 23 distinct pain points. Competitive analysis of 8 fintech and proptech platforms revealed opportunity gaps in onboarding, payment confirmation, and reporting.

14 Interviews Journey Maps Competitive Audit Affinity Mapping

Information Architecture

Rebuilt the IA from scratch. Card sorting sessions with 12 participants validated new navigation models. Reduced primary navigation from 11 items to 5 core areas without losing functionality — by surfacing context-relevant actions inline.

Card Sorting Sitemap Redesign Tree Testing

Wireframes & Flows

Low-fidelity wireframes for 40+ screens across three surfaces — property manager dashboard, resident portal, and mobile app. Key flows: onboarding, rent payment, lease signing, and financial reporting. Each flow pressure-tested against edge cases and error states before moving to hi-fi.

Dashboard Wireframe

Payment Flow

Mobile Wireframes

Design System Foundation

Built APT's design system from zero — tokens, components, patterns, documentation. Every component was built in Figma with variant sets covering all states: default, hover, focus, error, loading, disabled. Engineers received a Figma file they could read like a spec sheet.

Token Architecture 60+ Components Dark + Light Modes

Prototyping & Validation

Interactive prototypes for all critical paths tested with 8 users per round. Two rounds of usability testing revealed specific friction points in the payment confirmation flow and the lease-signing wizard. Both were iterated within the sprint before handoff.

2 Usability Rounds 8 Participants / Round Task Success Rate +34%

Product Showcase

Designed for every surface

From the banking app interface to credit card design and full marketing campaign — every touchpoint crafted with intention.

The Bank App

A full mobile app redesign incorporating custom illustrations that communicate APT's environmental commitment and seamless payment experience.

Mobile App

Dashboard UI

Payment Flow

Transactions View

Credit Card Design

A Canada-themed card series designed for APT's physical and digital payment cards — bold identity, clean typography, national pride.

Card on Device

Card Design — Variant D

Card Variant A

Card Variant B

Card Variant C

Marketing Campaign

Dark-themed advertisement series centered on "Simple, safe, and secure" — aligned with APT's brand voice and distributed across digital and print channels.

Ad — Simple

Ad — Safe

Ad — Secure

Campaign — Page 1

Campaign — Page 2

Campaign — Page 3

Campaign — Page 4

Campaign — Page 5

Campaign — Full Spread

Key Features

Built for how property teams actually work

Every feature emerged from research. Every interaction was pressure-tested against real workflows.

💰

One-Click Rent Collection

Auto-pay setup takes 60 seconds. ACH, credit card, and e-transfer — all supported. Payment status visible in real-time with push notifications for every state change.

ACH Transfer Credit Card Auto-Pay

Payment Flow UI

📊

Real-Time Financial Dashboard

Cash flow, collection rates, outstanding balances, and trends — updated live. No more month-end surprises.

Total Collected $284,491

Outstanding $14,200

Overdue $3,450

📝

Digital Lease Signing

E-signature with full audit trail. Residents sign leases on any device in minutes — not days.

✍️

Lease_2025_4B.pdf

Signed · Verified

🔔

Smart Notifications

Contextual alerts for payment due dates, maintenance updates, lease renewals — without the noise.

Rent due in 3 days — $2,525

Maintenance #1042 assigned

🔒

Compliance Built-In

FINTRAC, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2 compliant. Disclosures integrated naturally — never blocking the flow.

PCI-DSS SOC 2 FINTRAC

🏘️

Portfolio Management at Scale

Manage hundreds of units across multiple properties from a single dashboard. Role-based access for your entire team — managers, accountants, maintenance staff.

Multi-Property Role-Based Access Team Collaboration

📱

Native Mobile Experience

Residents manage everything from their phone — payments, maintenance requests, documents, and communication. Native feel, zero friction.

📱

iOS & Android

Cross-platform · Accessible

Measurable Outcomes

Design that moved the numbers

Outcomes measured 6 months post-launch against pre-redesign baseline.

Faster Payment Completion

Rent Collection Rate

App Store Rating (from 2.9)

Reduction in Support Tickets

"The new resident portal transformed our relationship with tenants. Payments are on time, support tickets dropped dramatically, and we actually get compliments on the software now — which has never happened before."

Jordan M.

VP Operations, Northview Properties

"I used to dread paying rent online — something always went wrong or I wasn't sure if it went through. The new app makes it obvious, instant, and actually kind of satisfying. I pay three days early now."

Sarah T.

Resident, APT Pay User

Reflection

What I learned building for high-stakes UX

Financial products demand a different design posture. When real money is moving, every ambiguous confirmation state, every misleading label, every slow loading screen erodes the trust you need to convert and retain users.

The most impactful changes weren't the big redesigns — they were micro-moments: the animation on a successful payment, the clarity of an error message, the speed of a page transition. Those compound into an experience that feels effortless.

Trust is visual before it's logical. Users decided whether APT Pay felt trustworthy within 3 seconds of landing on a screen — before reading a word.

Empty states are conversion moments. The first time a property manager saw the dashboard with no data was an opportunity we almost missed. We turned it into onboarding.

Design systems pay compound interest. The upfront investment in tokens and components paid dividends every sprint — new features shipped in half the time.

Compliance can be invisible. Every legal requirement can be met without friction if you design the disclosure into the natural flow rather than gatekeeping progress behind it.

Mobile-first isn't a constraint — it's a quality filter. If a flow doesn't work elegantly on mobile, it's not a mobile problem. It's a complexity problem.

Reinventing
Real Estate
Payments

The future of property payments — designed from scratch