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David Service(current)
UX Product Strategist & Design Team Leader
Research & Discovery:
Challenges Faced:
- A Stressful & Time-Critical Process of looking for affordable housing was further being complicated by complex eligibility requirements and multiple touch-points.
- No Single Source-of-Truth was available to undertake this process effectively.
- Legacy Touch-Points were Driving Up Costs and limiting the ability of the agency to deliver effective services to the populations that needed them.
What We Learned (Pains & Priorities):
- Public Housing was a Critical Bulwark in offsetting rapidly rising real estate prices, and a looming affordability crisis for city residents.
- Diverse & Frustrated Users would cost more money to support as they would need to leverage several touch-points simultaneously to complete tasks in a time-critical environment.
High-Level Goals (OKRs):
- Increase the Efficacy of the housing process by creating a single, accessible touchpoint.
- Reduce the Associated Support Costs of obtaining public housing through the design and introduction of a more efficient placement process.
Understanding & Simplifying Requirements with Personas & User-Flows - Detailed deliverables that included a mix of qualitative/quantitative information were produced to keep the needs of users in mind, while examining how they would likely move through the website to find what they needed.
Matching Users’ Mental Models with Card-Sorting & Tree-Testing - Card-sorting exercises were conducted with multiple users to help organize the website content into an appropriate mental model, then we confirmed this model with extensive tree-testing that resulted in a finalized information architecture containing all critically needed content and functionality.
Responsive Web Design:
What We Learned (Insights & Actions Taken):
- Balancing Simplicity & Advanced Capability was needed to serve a diverse body of users comprehensively, without “overloading” them.
- Content & Functionality were Dependent on each other to enable users to effectively accomplish their tasks, indicating a more deliberate UX strategy that accounted for this.
- Most Common Inquiries via Customer-Support was a useful data-driven method for prioritizing requirements.
Value Generated (KPIs):
- Increased User-Engagement by expanding the capabilities of the website to include all key activities associated with procuring housing and on-going housing services.
- Decreased User Task-Times by carefully designing workflows that were intuitive, and made both information-seeking and task completion easier.
- Increased Successful Task Completion by closely integrating required functionality with related content so users could quickly act on their new knowledge.
Presenting Essential Functionality with Wireframes - Starting from a “mobile-first” design approach, detailed wireframes were produced and refined for each page (and device size), and through several iterations became the basis for the prototypes that followed.
Expanding on the Brand with Style Guides - A simple Style Guide document was produced to cover basic interface patterns, and provide a consistent presentation and tone that adhered to accessibility requirements.
Testing & Optimization:
What We Learned (Feedback & Priorities):
- User Empowerment was Central to creating value in what was otherwise a stressful and time-consuming process.
- Users Approached Similar Tasks Differently leading to optimizations in both browsing and searching capabilities.
Value Generated (KPIs):
- Increased Support-Center Effectiveness with a 20% reduction in call volume, leading to reductions in associated costs with higher quality issue resolution.
- Accessibility was Enhanced & Costs Reduced through a newly established Style Guide, that adhered to WCAG best-practices, establishing more consistent interactions that could be implemented with less development time.
Refinements & Optimization using InVision Prototypes & Usability-Testing - Interactive Prototypes were used for on-going usability-testing to refine designs before they were submitted for development.
© 2016 David Service
Version 3.2.0