Project overview
Merge several desktop programs for managing affordable housing into an existing SaaS platform of management tools for market-rate properties. Create unified interface elements and navigation patterns to enable a consistent experience across various product features and accommodate extensive client customization.
My Role: Lead UX Design Consultant
Challenges
Affordable housing management is dictated by widely variable local, state, and federal government programs with extensive regulatory oversight, adding significant complexity to every process.
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Each product had a different approach to managing regulations and needed to be reconciled into one process that would accommodate decades of previously existing data and users' mental models.
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The platform allows clients heavy customization options, so UI conventions had to support a page being built and functioning independently within a tab.
Design Process:
Process Flows
The focus was on understanding the user's underlying mental models of how they approached workflows so that we could provide a sense of continuity and their extensive experience would be transferable.
With an extremely tight timeline for the merging of products to meet a regulatory deadline, the opportunity for direct user-generated insight was not a practical option. As a result, we worked closely with internal facing support, training, implementation, and customization teams through frequent rounds of co-design and prototype reviews.
Designs
Testing:
Considering the significant departure from the existing experiences, prototypes were integral in presenting new processes to get detailed validation from internal work groups and users.
Results:
We significantly reduced the number of steps and processes required to accomplish an average task by approximately a third.
The end result was a platform that allows any client type, from a local Housing Authority to a Voucher based/Housing Project property owner, to manage all their assets and programs.