Pre-Approval Flow Redesign
Simplifying visitor pre-approvals for gated communities
OVERVIEW
Redesigning a feature into a seamless, scalable experience that simplifies visitor pre-approvals. My goal was to create a faster, more intuitive experience for residents to pre-approve visitors like delivery partners, cabs, or guests, without unnecessary steps or clutter.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Me, 3 Developers,
Timeline
Sep 2024 - Dec 2024
Resposibilities
Research synthesis
UX design
Visual design
Design Integration
Developer handoff
Better discoverability or understanding of the pre-approval flow
UX / feature push working as intended
33%
Increase in pre-approvals created
OVERVIEW
What’s pre-approval
Pre-Approval lets residents authorise visits in advance, helping avoid delays and missed notifications. The legacy flow was cluttered, overloaded with unrelated features and lacked a clear visual hierarchy.
It needed a complete experience rethink.
What’s pre-approval?
Pre-Approval lets residents authorise visits in advance, helping avoid delays and missed notifications.
What’s pre-approval?
Pre-Approval lets residents authorise visits in advance, helping avoid delays and missed notifications.
Why Redesign
A simpler and in turn faster pre-approval flow that MyGate uses has changed user expectations.
Our pre-approval feature was designed as early as 2018, it needed UI update
We are introducing a number of new features like party/group invite, multiple entries for single day. Instead of adding these in the old design, it seemed more efficient to launch with redesign.
WHERE IT STARTED
Issues in the Existing Detail Page
Pre-Approval lets residents authorise visits in advance, helping avoid delays and missed notifications. The legacy flow was cluttered, overloaded with unrelated features and lacked a clear visual hierarchy.
It needed a complete experience rethink.
WHERE IT STARTED
Research
With no budget for user research, I relied on:
Clickstream analytics for behavioral insights,
Stakeholder interviews for context, and
Internal reviews for quick validation.
Working under constraints sharpened my ability to prioritise decisions that created the highest usability impact.
Most pre-approvals were for deliveries within an hour.
Only five “other” visitor types accounted for 90% of selections.
Company lists were scanned inefficiently
Design Principles
Simplify Decision-Making: Reduce effort for frequent scenarios.
Prioritize Discoverability: Organize information for faster scanning.
Preserve Context: Maintain visual connection with the home screen.
Design for Delight: End flows with small moments of satisfaction.
Build for Scale: Ensure flexibility for future visitor categories.
Designing for Context and Continuity
Initial explorations used bottom sheets and dialog boxes to create a lightweight flow. However, pre-approvals required more structure than quick overlays could support.
I proposed a translucent full-page layout, keeping the user visually anchored to the home screen while providing space for decision-making.
Sheet layout iteration
Simplifying Decision-Making
Removed optional and low-value fields like Add Company Name and Collect at Gate.
First view data & defaults
Aligning Flow with User Intent
Previously, users were asked to select or add a contact first — even though most pre-approvals were for short-term visits. I restructured the hierarchy to begin with visit type and duration, followed by guest or delivery details.
Guest flow change
Enhancing Information Organization
The old design displayed a long, unorganized list of company names, making scanning tedious.Using the 5 Hat Racks method (organizing information by category, location, time, alphabet, or hierarchy), I reorganized them into an alphabetical grid layout.
Add compnay service - list
Prioritizing High-Frequency Actions
Learning from clickstream data, I surfaced the top five most-used categories in the “Others” flow directly on the main view. Less frequent categories remained accessible under an expandable section. This reduced the number of taps for 90% of users — a simple but high-impact optimisation.
Add compnay service - list
Extending Functionality without Complexity: Group Invite
People often host events and need an easier way to pre-approve multiple guests.
I designed a Group Invite flow where residents could:
Generate and share an invite link,
Track guest responses and entry status,
Pause new entries or remove unwanted ones, and
Add event themes for a personalized touch.
Following the Peak-End Rule, the flow ends on a positive emotional note.
Group Invite
Clarifying Multi-Entry Logic
We added support for multiple entries within a single day.
Initially categorized as “Frequent,” it caused confusion.
To resolve this, I ran a card-sorting exercise with 12 colleagues, revealing that users think in terms of certainty rather than frequency.
This led to renaming the tab from Once → One Day.
Once vs one day
Cross-functional Collaboration
With PMs: Analyzed lead data to prioritize possession and pricing details. With Developers: Identified reusable components to meet sprint deadlines efficiently. This collaboration balanced business objectives, design intent, and technical feasibility — ensuring impact without scope creep.
Impact
MetricOutcomeGET_FLOOR_PLAN, PRICE_REQUEST, SHOW_INTEREST leads↑ 70%New CTAs (CLAIM_BENEFITS, CONNECT)~350 leads/weekLead-to-meeting schedule rate (project pages)↑ 35% (7.23% → 9.76%)Society page leads↑ 40%Society page conversion (meeting schedules)↑ 67.6% (3.36% → 5.6%)PRICE_REQUEST CTAAccounted for 30% of total leads
Key Learnings
Great design is data-informed, not data-driven — numbers should guide empathy, not replace it.
Scalability isn’t only about reusable components; it’s about structuring information that adapts to different contexts.
Even without direct user research, strong collaboration and data interpretation can lead to evidence-based design.
