Housing Readiness Report
Helping affordable housing advocates leverage data to track policy implementation in their cities
UX/UI Design · User Testing · Workshop Facilitation
Overview
Client
San Francisco Foundation
Role
Design Lead
Tools
Figma, Dovetail, Notion, Miro
Timeline
7 months
Brief
The Housing Readiness Report is an initiative that was started by the San Francisco Foundation (SFF) as a way to increase awareness and encourage public participation in the 6th Cycle Housing Element process, during which jurisdictions across the Bay Area developed and finalized their housing plans for the next 8-year cycle.
Now, that housing plans had been set, SFF wanted to reorient the site to support community advocates, government staff, and regional partners during implementation by tracking progress towards housing goals and providing the tools and resources to take further action.
Approach
Since there were a lot of different directions that we could take the Housing Readiness Report, our team wanted to hear directly from stakeholders in the housing space on what role it could play in supporting them in achieving affordable housing outcomes.
To accomplish this, I organized and co-facilitated a 3-hour workshop with 20+ participants, including government partners, community-based organization leaders, funders, and legal advocates. The purpose of the session was to identify key goals and challenges for our two primary audiences (community advocates and government officials), frame them as jobs to be done, and then generate ideas for how to best support the highest priority jobs.
The workshop was an illuminating experience, getting to hear from so many different stakeholders who are all rarely in the same collaborative space together, all with different perspectives on how to achieve the same goal. Having the opportunity to understand the unique dynamics and nuances at play gave me a deeper appreciation of just how tricky it is to resources that effectively serve and speak to different audiences in the space.
With that said, our group was able to successfully generate several jobs to be done for our team to focus on, including:
Community Advocates: Help me to provide accurate data to the public so that I can better engage with advocates.
Government Officials: Help me to better understand what other cities have done so that I can quickly draft up effective policies and programs.
Process
From the workshop, our team formed the hypothesis that what our users needed was access to better data. The issue was that a lot of this data was buried deep in hundred-page PDFs unique to each jurisdiction with no easy way to cross-reference.
Fortunately, a byproduct of the workshop we facilitated was that we were able to build a strong relationship with Public Advocates, a legal advocacy nonprofit, who had recently built a powerful database with this purpose of making this housing data more accessible and were looking for ways to get it in the hands of stakeholders in the space. The Housing Readiness Report provided the perfect opportunity to do so.
With access to the data we needed secured, I set about exploring how this data could live in our existing information architecture.
After prototyping these changes in the site, I conducted usability testing with 7 users, who were representative of our two primary user personas.
The tests validated our hypothesis and overall design direction, but also gave us a lot of feedback to chew on in terms of how we could make the data accessible not just from a hyperlocal lens, but a big-picture, cross-jurisdictional view.
With this in mind, I partnered closely with our PM and key client stakeholder to iterate on the current information architecture of the site. I also redesigned our user flows to better connect users to relevant tools and resources, enabling them to take action in response to the data they were seeing.
Impact
Increased active engagement time on the site by 59%
The updated information architecture and user flows, designed to get users to the areas of the site most relevant to them quicker, were effective in driving higher engagement among users.
Promoted higher engagement off the site, as well
By better connecting users to the data, resources, and tools they need to actually effect change, the redesign also positioned the site to be more effective in its ultimate goal, which is to drive action off the site and further affordable housing outcomes in the Bay Area.
