Cozy
A platform built to take the stress out of renting, Cozy allows small landlords to run their rentals online with applicant screening tools, rent payments, maintenance and expense tracking. Renters can apply to places more securely, build their credit by paying their rent, and get affordable renters insurance in one place.
A brief history
I joined Cozy early on as the second designer. I worked on many of the foundational product features like payments, applications, and renter screening tools, and helped to develop our product and brand voice.
As Cozy grew, I shifted my focus to build a Design team and help shape our practices, including using research and testing, building design systems, and improving our collaboration with our engineering and support teams.
In late 2018 Cozy was acquired by CoStar Group. Since then, our team has been working on a similar suite of tools for Apartments.com, a leader in the rental-serach space.
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Rent payments
My Role: Research, Visual and UX Design
Paying rent with checks has become an antiquated process in the digital age. Products like Venmo, Paypal, and Cash have made it extremely easy to send payments to others, but many landlords have resisted using these services becuase they don't meet their unique needs. Cozy allows landlords to request monthly rent payments, security deposits, and one-time payments all in one place. Renters can securely set up automatic payments, split their rent with roommates, and even improve their credit, simply by paying their rent.
Select screens from the renter set up flow. Left: renters can choose to pay automatically every month or send payments manually. Either way, they’ll be reminded via email a few days before rent is due. Right: Renters can choose to pay via ACH (for free), or with cards for a fee. We integrated with a product called Plaid to instantly verify bank accounts with a user’s credentials.
The transaction view (internally known as ‘the ledger’) is similar for landlords and renters – a place where both parties can see upcoming and historical payments and bills, as well as the current status of what is owed as of today (the balance).
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Renter Applications & Screening
My Role: Reserach, Visual and UX Design
Way back in 2012, Cozy pioneered the idea of creating applications that renters control. Renters can create a re-shareable profile with employment and residence history, and purchase and securely share their credit report and background check with landlords on Cozy.
Landlords are able to require screening reports from anyone who applies to their place and immediately get the full picture of an applicant, without having to collect fees or handle sensitive info like social security numbers.
Landlords can share their listings directly with renters to apply to, or syndicate them to partner sites to reach a wider audience.
The landlord application overview shows an income to rent comparison – a critical piece of info for most landlords.
We pioneered the idea of renter-run credit reports (and later, background checks) that could be securely shared with landlords, without having to hand over your social security number. Our reports offer useful debt breakdowns that allow landlords to quickly understand a person’s credit history, without having to sift through the details of all their accounts (though they can do that if they wish).
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Renters Insurance
My Role:: Creative Direction, Strategy, Preliminary Designs. Rollout and design finesse from Kyle Lambert
In 2017, we began working on an idea to bring low-cost, basic renters insurance policies to Cozy. Insurance policies cover both landlord and resident property – and many landlords require renters to carry insurance in their leases. Since we had both parties on our platform, we were able to solve a few problems:
- Educate both landlords and renters about the benefits of renters insurance
- Allow landlords to require insurance policies from their renters, and verify proof of coverage
- Provide basic, affordable policies that adequately covered both landlords and renters.
During their rent setup, renters are presented with a one-click quote (tailored to localities and property settings entered by the landlord). Normally, purchasing insurance requires getting on the phone with someone and customizing coverage amounts. We simplified this by providing a basic, non-customizable policy that’s affordable for renters and satisfies the needs of most landlords.
Landlords are able to view renter proof of coverage in Cozy. Policies purchased in Cozy are ‘verified’ and stay updated.
We created marketing pages for both landlords and renters on our old marketing site (with its wacky slide out side nav).
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Cozy Marketing Site
My role: Creative Direction, Project Management. Designers: Taylor Raquer and Kyle Lambert (illustrations and front-end dev). A bunch of other folks contributed to this project.
In 2018 we re-launched our marketing site — building a new visual language and tailoring our message to independent landlords. In the previous 5 years, we'd learned a lot about our audience, and how our previous site wasn't serving them well. Some of the key insights we discovered:
- A ton of landlords signed up for Cozy to kick the tires, but never activated a listing or started a lease.
- Many 'active' landlords used a single feature from our platform again and again, but never adopted the full suite of tools.
- 95% of our users were managing less than 5 units. These people were running their rentals in addition to their day jobs, and often weren't up to date on local rental laws or best practices.
- Landlords who had taken the time to watch a demo or visit our help center were much more likely to become active users on Cozy.
With this new found knowledge, we focused our efforts in a few ways:
- Convey the full suite of tools we provided; from finding good renters, to getting paid on-time, to managing expenses and maintenance, all in one place.
- Bring educational resources like live demos, video walk throughs, and blog posts to the forefront to build a sense of trust and let people see the product before committing to it.
- Be opinionated about who we're serving (independent landlords), and how we serve them (in a friendly, supportive manner).
The homepage uses value-driven messaging, and an interactive illustration that conveys that our tools can be used throughout the landlord lifecycle. Each section maps to a set of features.
After realizing that many landlords were reluctant to move their entire business (and their renters) over to a new platform, we elevated our help center content to build trust and ease them into our product.
Instead of architecting the site in a ‘feature-forward’ manner, we chose to build it around the different phases of the landlord lifecycle: reaching and finding qualified tenants, automating their rentals, and managing their businesses.