Learning from other cities is the first step toward improving affordable housing lotteries
One of the largest cities in the US partnered with US Digital Response to conduct user research to help improve their income-restricted housing lottery platform to better serve housing seekers and housing developers. I was enlisted by USDR to synthesize insights and lessons learned from interviews with officials in peer cities. I provided this service pro bono.
Services provided: UX Research
My approach
- I analyzed, tagged, and synthesized findings from three, one-hour interviews with digital housing platform counterparts in NYC and San Francisco, using Dovetail.
- I identified the most relevant lessons learned from other cities’ implementations of digital housing platforms.
- I navigated the housing lottery platform as a user would, documenting all my steps as screenshots in a Miro board for the team to reference later, including user flows from peer city housing platforms.
Results Delivered
- Slide deck with top insights and lessons learned from each peer city interview.
- Visual documentation of peer cities’ digital housing platforms in a Miro board.
- Top 3 opportunities for improvement to inform the project’s roadmap.
“Thanks for adding so much value in such a short time.”
How you can achieve similar results
- Use your own platform as a user would and make note of the places where you get stuck, frustrated, or confused.
- Identify other organizations that have already implemented a solution to the problem you currently have and interview them. Ask them what went well and, in hindsight, what they would do differently. You might just save yourself from making the same mistakes. Write up the top 2 or 3 lessons learned from each organization and share it with your stakeholders.