NOEL GONZALEZ

Project Overview

Rentvine's property management platform lacked a centralized financial dashboard for property owners. Owners had no way to quickly assess the health of their real estate investments—net cash flow, total equity, and cash-on-cash returns were scattered across different screens or unavailable entirely. Without this visibility, owners relied heavily on property managers for routine financial questions, creating bottlenecks and eroding trust.

The absence of a contribution workflow compounded the problem. Owners who needed to make payments toward their properties had no self-service mechanism—every contribution required coordination with their property manager, adding friction and delays to time-sensitive transactions.

For Rentvine as a business, this gap meant property managers were spending disproportionate time fielding basic financial inquiries instead of scaling their operations. The dashboard represented an opportunity to boost transparency, automate routine interactions, and give owners the autonomy they expected from a modern SaaS platform.

Business Objective: Design a Property Net Cash Flow Dashboard that gives owners a high-level view of their investment performance, detailed expense breakdowns with year-over-year comparison, and a self-service contribution workflow—reducing manager inquiries and accelerating owner actions across all devices.

Impact at a Glance

• 3 KPIs — Net Cash Flow, Total Equity, Cash-on-Cash Return
• Self-Serve — Owner contributions and payments without manager
• Responsive — Desktop, tablet, and mobile optimized experience

The Gap — What Owners Needed vs. What Existed

My Approach — Research-Driven, Collaboratively Built

I led the end-to-end design process for the dashboard, from initial stakeholder conversations through final design handoff. The project required tight coordination across product, engineering, and subject matter experts—particularly because the dashboard surfaced financial data that needed to be both accurate and actionable.

• Discover & Define — Conducted stakeholder interviews and market research to define KPI requirements, data visualization needs, and contribution workflow scope. Produced a comprehensive intake document.
• Design & Iterate — Created wireframes and information architecture. Conducted two rounds of iteration with stakeholders and engineering before producing a high-fidelity prototype for team review.
• Validate & Hand Off — Reviewed final prototype with full team. Verified engineering feasibility for data availability. Delivered final design specifications and a working prototype for development.

Collaboration — Cross-Functional Coordination

This project involved continuous collaboration across multiple disciplines. As Lead Designer, I served as the connective thread between business goals, data availability, and user experience.

Front-End Engineering: I worked closely with front-end engineers to ensure design deliverables were implementable within the existing tech stack. This included aligning on responsive breakpoints, chart library capabilities, and component behavior across devices. Several custom components needed to be built from scratch since they didn't exist in the current design system or any off-the-shelf solution.

Back-End Engineering: I synced regularly with back-end engineers to confirm that the financial data I planned to surface—Net Cash Flow by month, expense breakdowns, year-over-year comparisons, and contribution history—would be available via APIs for the front end. This proactive coordination prevented late-stage surprises about data gaps or calculation discrepancies.

Stakeholders & Subject Matter Experts: I facilitated multiple touchpoints with stakeholders and subject matter experts throughout the project to align on which KPIs mattered most, how expense categories should be structured, and what level of financial detail would be most useful to property owners without overwhelming them.

The Design — Dashboard & Contribution Experience

Financial KPI Overview

The dashboard surfaces three primary investment KPIs at the top level, giving owners an immediate snapshot of their property's financial health:

• Net Cash Flow — Monthly income minus expenses, providing the most direct measure of property profitability.
• Total Equity — The owner's current equity position in the property, reflecting overall investment value.
• Cash-on-Cash Return — Annual return as a percentage of total cash invested, a key metric for investment decisions.

Data Visualization

Below the KPIs, two interactive graphs provide deeper financial insight:

Net Cash Flow by Month: A time-series chart showing monthly cash flow trends with year-over-year comparison capabilities. Owners can quickly identify seasonal patterns, anomalies, and long-term trajectory of their property's financial performance.

Monthly Expense Breakdown: A detailed expense visualization that breaks down all costs by category for a specific property or the entire portfolio. The graph displays current month and prior month data side-by-side, giving owners immediate context on whether expenses are trending up or down.

Make Contribution Modal

A core addition to the owner experience was a self-service contribution workflow, accessed via a "Make Contribution" button directly on the dashboard. The modal was designed to handle multiple payment scenarios cleanly:

• Payment Types — Three options: e-check (checking or savings), credit card, and debit card. Each type has its own tailored input flow with appropriate validation.
• Save Payment Methods — Users can save payment methods for future contributions. Saved methods are stored securely and presented as the default selection on subsequent visits.
• New Card Entry — For credit and debit cards, a complete entry form captures required card details with the option to save for future payments.
• Contribution Flow — The user selects a saved or new payment method, enters the contribution amount, agrees to terms and conditions, and submits. The flow is intentionally minimal to reduce drop-off.
• Smart Defaults — If a payment method has been previously saved, it automatically appears as the primary default the next time the modal is opened—reducing steps for repeat contributors.

For e-check, users can provide checking or savings accounts. When entering a new credit card, the form captures required information with the option to save for future payments. If a card payment has been saved, it appears as the primary default the next time the user wants to contribute.

To contribute from a saved payment, the user opens the modal via the Make Contribution button, selects the saved payment method, enters the amount, agrees to terms and conditions, and submits.

Business Impact

Transparency & Trust: By surfacing clear owner statements, financial KPIs, and detailed expense breakdowns, the dashboard promoted trust accounting transparency. Owners could verify their property's financial health independently, reducing the volume of routine financial questions directed at property managers.

Owner Autonomy: The self-service contribution modal eliminated the back-and-forth coordination previously required for owner payments. With saved payment methods and smart defaults, repeat contributions became a matter of seconds rather than emails and phone calls.

Manager Scalability: Every owner inquiry that the dashboard answers autonomously is time returned to the property manager. By shifting routine financial visibility and payment actions to the owner portal, property managers could scale their operations more profitably—managing more properties without proportionally increasing their support burden.

Responsive Reach: Designing the dashboard to be fully responsive across desktop, tablet, and mobile ensured that owners could check their investments and make contributions from any device, at any time. This was particularly important for owners who manage properties as a side investment and primarily access the portal on mobile.

Reflection

Building Custom Components from Scratch: One of the most significant design challenges was that several components required for the dashboard—particularly the financial data visualizations and the contribution modal—didn't exist in Rentvine's current design system or any off-the-shelf component library. I designed these components from the ground up, establishing patterns that could be reused across the platform. This required close collaboration with engineering to ensure the custom components were technically feasible and performant across all breakpoints.

Data-First Information Architecture: Designing a financial dashboard means every pixel carries meaning. I invested significant time in information architecture—deciding which KPIs to surface at the top level, how to structure expense categories, and what level of granularity to expose in the graphs. The guiding principle was to show owners what they need to make a decision, not everything the system knows about their property. This restraint made the dashboard informative without being overwhelming.

Bridging Front-End and Back-End: A unique aspect of this project was the need to coordinate with both front-end and back-end engineering simultaneously. The dashboard's value depended entirely on the data behind it—if a KPI wasn't available via the API, it couldn't appear on the dashboard. By engaging back-end engineers early, I was able to adjust the design to match available data rather than delivering specs that couldn't be built. This proactive approach saved considerable rework.

Designing for Dual Audiences: Although the dashboard was an owner-facing feature, every design decision had implications for property managers as well. The transparency the dashboard created needed to reduce manager workload, not increase it by generating new types of questions. I designed the information hierarchy and labeling to be self-explanatory, minimizing the risk that owners would misinterpret data and escalate to their manager for clarification.

Recommendation

"Noel was a pleasure to work with during his time with Rentvine. He was able to streamline our UI/UX design process, brand and unify the designs throughout our application, which, inherently, made our developers more efficient.

Noel possesses a unique blend of technical expertise and artistic skill, allowing him to conceptualize and execute designs that revolutionized our application. He is adept at leveraging various design tools and platforms to bring concepts to life, all while ensuring seamless user experiences across different devices and platforms. One of the largest initiatives Noel accomplished while with Rentvine was redesigning our entire web-based application to become mobile responsive."

Project Overview

The chatbot feature was intended to provide and improve the customer experience between the customers product and the audience. The chatbot will have the ability to capture warm leads around the clock and funnel the data accordantly as specified by the user. The Chatbot can serve as automation for QA, Sales, Customer Service and many more applications.

The Problem

The problem we faced was that we had six months to execute this feature. We did not have an existing pattern or background regarding whether to buy something, rent something, or integrate with a third party, and we needed to learn how to create this dynamic chatbot from scratch, which the user could leverage on their website or mobile phone.

Project Role

I was the UX lead designer for the Chatbot feature and worked hand-in-hand with my product manager to conduct competitive research analysis and provide recommendations regarding purchasing or building something from scratch for this feature. After determining we would make the chatbot, I had countless touchpoints with my CEO, stakeholders, design team, and engineers to learn how to leverage the SharpSpring machine learning model.

Goals

The goal was to create and design a plan for a working Chatbot for beta within six months. It would be released to a small audience to test, validate, and provide time for ideation for a better user experience.

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution was to create a three-step modal that would allow us to collect the correct amount of information that would help us to be able to specify the domain-specific area in the domain, and also allow us to understand if this was going to be for everyone a new visitor, returning visitor, or a lead in a specific pipeline or just a customer with a particular value. In the final step, the idea was to customize your chatbot. The user will be able to skin visually and apply brand colors or a logo, so it will feel native to the website or the mobile website on the phone.

The Chatbot feature release allows deeper integration into SharpSpring CRM. I designed the Chatbot feature for desktop and mobile customer experience out of the box. I utilized the current existing patterns of the CRM Visual Workflow Builder that customers are familiar with to provide a seamless new feature and increase a higher adaptivity rate.

Outcome

The Chatbot feature was realized as planned, received overwhelmingly positive support from the community, and has made a positive difference in SharpSpring's long-term strategy and product roadmap.

Recommendation

"Noel showed his true talent and UX grit was during the major new feature 'Chatbots'. He guided this project design from beginning to end, showing his ability to pivot and work within technical constraints time and again. He had endless touch points with stakeholders to ensure the designs were on track and were meeting expectations. The 6 month project was his main focus during that time but he also found time to contribute to the team on smaller initiatives and team building exercises.

When the Chatbots project was launched to the general public, it saw strong adoption rates and very low customer complaints. The Chatbots project stands out as a huge success to the company and represents a waypoint on which to set future project metrics."

Project Overview

Designed an application that enables users to seamlessly upload headless documents, Excel sheets, or text files, and leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically format data and generate intelligent recommendations.

Proposed Solution

Designed an application that allows users to easily upload multiple file types and leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to:

• Automatically clean and format raw data
• Standardize file structures for consistency
• Provide intelligent recommendations based on the processed data

The intuitive interface guides users through the upload process and gives real-time feedback, making complex automation accessible to non-technical users.

Impact

• Significant Time Savings — Automates repetitive data-mapping tasks, reducing processing time by up to 70%.
• Enhanced Data Quality and Consistency — Reduces manual errors, ensuring reliable outputs that are ready for downstream systems.
• Increased Scalability — Allows teams to handle large datasets and frequent uploads without increasing headcount.
• Boosted User Productivity — Frees users from manual formatting so they can focus on analysis and decision-making.
• Higher Adoption and Satisfaction — The clean, intuitive interface encourages wider adoption among both technical and non-technical users.

Design Challenges

Displaying incomplete or inconsistent data: One challenge was how to display partial or missing data without confusing users or causing them to make incorrect assumptions. We addressed this with clear placeholders, distinct status icons, and progressive disclosure to reveal details only when needed.

Building trust in automation recommendations: Users needed to understand why a field was recommended for mapping and still feel in control of the process. To address this, we included transparent explanation tooltips, color-coded statuses (mapped, suggested, unmapped), and simple approve/reject actions to reinforce confidence in the system.

Visual clarity with complex datasets: Managing large volumes of data required a layout that could accommodate multiple data types while remaining easy to scan. The split-screen approach (configuration on the left, data visualization on the right) allowed users to focus on one context at a time while still seeing how their actions impacted the dataset in real-time.

Automating Data Uploads and Validation for Greater Efficiency

To further enhance usability, KPI indicators were integrated at the top of the interface. These KPIs surface critical insights—such as unmapped fields, invalid data points, or suggested mappings—helping users quickly identify and resolve issues during the import process.