01 — Overview
Project Overview
RentFlow is a multi-role prop-fintech Real Estate platform created for Dubai's rental market. The core innovation: tenants pay monthly while investors pre-fund the annual lease and share the spread with the platform.
As the sole Senior UX/UI Designer, I mapped each user journey — Tenant, Agent, Landlord, Investor — crafted a unified responsive UI kit, and delivered end-to-end screens including admin panel and transactional email flows, turning a novel funding model into a seamless, production-ready experience.
02 — Problem
Problem Statement & Challenge
The Middle East real estate market is very challenging for newcomers and citizens without property. Almost 34% of Dubai tenants need financing for their annual rent — they can't afford one lump-sum payment upfront, which is the market standard.
The client came up with a new approach: let tenants pay monthly while investors pre-fund the annual lease and earn a yield. My challenge was to design a platform that made this novel financial concept feel simple, trustworthy, and intuitive for all four user types simultaneously.
Key insight
34% of Dubai tenants require rent financing — an untapped market with real demand for a monthly-payment model.
01
4 distinct user roles
Tenant, Agent/Landlord, Investor, and Admin — each needed a tailored flow without feeling like 4 separate products.
02
Novel financial model
Explaining yield-share and pre-funding clearly enough that users could trust and act on it — without legal jargon.
03
RTL & localisation
The platform needed to feel at home in Dubai's bilingual (Arabic/English) property market with RTL-ready design from day one.
03 — Discovery & Strategy
Discovery & Strategy
To ground the project in real-world context, I began with a SWOT analysis of leading Dubai real-estate platforms, mapping their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Next, I ran a stakeholder workshop with the client to unpack the SWOT insights. We prioritized open questions and agreed to conduct at least five qualitative interviews with each core persona — tenants, agents, and landlords — while the client handled interviews with investors.
04 — Ideation → Wireframes → Validation
Design Process
After distilling insights from stakeholder and user interviews, I followed a structured four-step process to move from problem to polished product.
01
Define the feature set
Prioritized must-have capabilities based on recurring pain points and business value from research.
02
Set the visual direction
Built mood boards to align on tone, palette, and imagery. Trust and clarity were the north star.
03
Prototype fast
Sketched low-fidelity flows to validate IA and task completion before investing in hi-fi.
04
Polish the system
Selected typography and UI tokens, then moved to high-fidelity mockups for usability testing.
05 — Design Phase
Design System & UI Kit
Crafted an RTL-ready design system (8-pt grid, styles, typography). Delivered all assets, notes, and annotations to the client's development team. Designed high-fidelity screens with micro-interactions for booking, payment breakdown, and trust badges.
Tenant Journey
With the visual language and IA in place, I tackled the tenant journey first.
🔐
1. Onboarding
Seamless sign-up and login with email, phone, or social accounts. KYC-lite for rental eligibility.
🔍
2. Search & Filter
Fast, intuitive property discovery with smart filters, map view, and personalized recommendations.
👤
3. Tenant Account
Personalized hub for saved searches, payment schedule, monthly bills, and chat threads.
🏠
4. Property Details
Rich listings with video, tour requests, amenity insights, transparent costs, and trust badges.
All 4 roles — tailored end-to-end flows
Search, filter, and shortlist properties
Book viewing tours and submit rental applications
Monthly payment dashboard and lease tracker
Chat with agent / landlord in-app
List and manage properties with media uploads
Review tenant applications and approve leases
Track viewing appointments and rental income
Receive lump-sum payment upfront via platform
Browse investment opportunities with ROI projections
Fund lease tranches and track portfolio performance
Real-time ROI simulator before committing capital
Yield distribution dashboard and analytics
Full platform oversight — users, leases, transactions
KYC approval workflows and compliance checks
Revenue analytics and investor fund management
Email template management and notification centre
06 — Deliveries
Project Deliveries
Delivered 300+ pixel-perfect screens, each with redlines, annotations, and interactive prototypes, along with ongoing design QA for the dev team. I also ran a hand-off workshop with engineers, walking them through the Figma file structure, asset library, and inspection tools to ensure a smooth build.
07 — Results
Final Results
The results speak for themselves.
~120
Properties listed in the first 3 months, backed by AED 540k of investor capital — enough to cover 45 annual leases.
+57%
Tenant lead-to-lease conversion (from 7% pre-beta to 11% post-launch — a 57% relative lift).
Benchmarked against pre-launch pilot data
7 min
Investor sign-up time dropped from 20 min to under 7 min thanks to the streamlined ROI simulator.
65% reduction in time-to-invest
"Stakeholders highlighted the 'bank-grade clarity' of the flows and have already green-lit extending the design system to two sister products — evidence that detail-obsessed, data-informed design delivers measurable business impact."
— Project outcome summary, December 2023
