Automating Property Income

Dirent

Product Context

Dirent is a mobile-first property income platform designed for independent landlords in Kenya. The product focuses on automating billing, rent collection, reconciliation, and income visibility for landlords who manage their own properties without formal property management infrastructure. The platform also serves tenants and caretakers as supporting actors in the rent collection workflow.

The work was informed by direct exposure to property ownership challenges and supported by secondary research from KNBS, KMRC, Hass Consult, Statista, and regional proptech analyses.

Contraints

User constraints: Older landlords with M-Pesa–level tech familiarity and rigid existing habits
Trust constraints: Strong discomfort with third parties “handling” rent money
Data constraints: Property and tenant information is fragmented and rarely collated
Platform constraint: MVP limited to mobile app only
Market constraint: Fee sensitivity and resistance to switching from known practices

Key Design Decisions

Mobile-First, No Web Dependency

The product was designed mobile-first to align with how landlords already manage money and communication. Competing tools were web-first; this excluded many independent owners. The decision reduced onboarding friction and aligned with M-Pesa mental models.

Trade-off: Dense data workflows had to be simplified aggressively to fit small screens.

PIN-Based Authentication Over Passwords

Instead of passwords, the product uses PIN-based login with optional biometrics. This mirrors existing mobile money behaviour and lowers cognitive load for older users.

Trade-off: Reduced alignment with conventional SaaS security expectations in favour of familiarity.

Progressive Profile Completion

Landlords are allowed to sign up and defer full profile completion. Critical setup steps (payment details, properties, leases) can be saved and resumed later. This decision acknowledged that landlords rarely have all portfolio details readily available and that forcing completion would block activation.

Known friction: Profile depth on mobile remained heavy. Delegated access for caretakers was designed as a mitigation.

Simplified Lease Abstraction

Instead of digitising full legal lease documents, the system captures only operationally critical data: rent amount, frequency, deposits, utilities, due dates, and penalties.

Rationale: Transcribing legal documents adds complexity without improving rent collection outcomes.

Invoice-Bound Payments and Reconciliation

All tenant payments are tied to system-generated invoices. Tenants can partially pay but cannot overpay. Utilities are recorded before invoice generation to ensure payment finality. This removed ambiguity around “who paid what” and eliminated reliance on screenshots or self-declared confirmations.

Plain-Language Information Architecture

Navigation labels prioritised everyday language over financial terminology. For example, “Money” instead of “Transactions” or “Accounts”. The goal was immediate comprehension without onboarding education.

Execution Scope

End-to-end mobile app UX and UI
Landlord, tenant, and caretaker flows
Design system with tokens and reusable components in Figma
Dev-ready, high-fidelity designs handed off to engineering
Collaboration via Notion, Slack, ClickUp, and Google Meet

Validation Signals

Informal usability walkthroughs with landlords indicated the flows were easy to understand
Stakeholders signed off on the full design as build-ready
No quantitative usability testing or production metrics were collected

Outcome

Design-complete, stakeholder-approved MVP
Full rent collection, reconciliation, and withdrawal flows defined
Product positioned as build-ready, pending development execution

Risks and Deferred Problems

Payments infrastructure scalability, particularly landlord withdrawals
Customer support load around payment reversals and disputes
Caretaker digital literacy at scale

These risks were identified but not validated due to MVP scope limits.

Reflection

This project reinforced the importance of reducing complex financial systems into small, understandable units that match existing user behaviour. The core lesson was that in fintech and proptech, simplicity is not aesthetic preference but a prerequisite for trust and adoption.

Dirent reflects a judgment-led approach to UX: prioritising clarity, familiarity, and constraint-driven decisions over feature breadth or technical ambition.

Selected Work

A focused selection of product work across fintech, property, and operational platforms. These projects involve multi-role systems, complex workflows, and live production environments.