Durham Region Non-Profit Housing Website Redesign

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Canadians are struggling to find housing that meets their needs and budget. Durham Region Non Profit Housing purpose is to help meet the housing needs of the region’s population by providing and maintaining affordable housing.

Problem

We have found that  DRNPH’s website navigation is lacking clear communication, does not give users direction, has unclear labels and is missing a call to action.

The Idea

Our idea was to make the application process easier for users, improve access to information on non profit housing and help DRNPHC better reach their company vision. 

The Challenge

Our challenge was finding actual users looking for the subsidized housing and connecting to the stakeholders who never answered us.

Disciplines & Tools

User Research (Interviews + Surveys) & Analysis, Responsive Mobile and Desktop, User Experience Design (UI/UX), Interaction Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, In-person User Testing, Figma, Adobes.

My responsibilities

• Defining the scope & Strategy + Planning the project
• Conducting User Research (User Interviews and Surveys)
• Delivering solutions through UX Design methods and techniques (Interaction Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing and Visual Design)

METHODOLOGY

We kicked off our project with some discussions and planning, while keeping in mind that we needed to understand who our users were and what were some of their pain points.

USER RESEARCH & ANALYSIS

Target Users

Who were our target users?
Our target users were anyone who was looking for Rent-Geared-to-Income (RGI) or subsidized housing, housing subsidy, or benefits offered by the government to make rent affordable for households.

User Interviews

Next, we conducted in-person user interviews to understand their user's needs and their preferences when it came to processing the application and finding their requests throughout the website. To get this started, we created user interview questions based on our research goals and interviewed 9 participants that fit our target audience criteria. We also took notes during our interview sessions to gather data.

Research Data Analysis

We analyzed the research data that we had gathered by using the affinity mapping technique, where we thoroughly discussed our individual findings and tried to group them into categories. 

User Observations

By analyzing our user interviews we were able to notice a few main things that repeated themselves across our user base sample.

• Most did not know much about rent-geared-to-income.
• Many believe it to be a necessity that should be given more attention.
  
• Those who did know about rent-to-income housing did not have a positive impression of building maintenance/quality.
  
  

User Insight Statement

Rodney, a retired carpenter and current uber driver from Durham Region needs access to information on applying to and living in a rent geared to income building for himself and his family. They need to be able to afford decent accomodations and save for his granddaughter’s education.

Recent years have seen a drastic increase in the need for affordable housing in the greater toronto area. Low income Canadians under financial stress need easy access to information on applying and living in rent geared to income buildings to help make sure they have access to living accomodations in trying times.

User Journey Map

After our analysis, we extracted some key findings from our overall survey response data and user interview data. Here is our User Journey Map.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

For the next phase, we moved on to Competitive Analysis. We looked at some of the websites that already existed in the market, which we could learn from. 

A competitor analysis was conducted on 3 competitors, 2 direct and 1 indirect competition.  

Sites Analyzed:

• CRC Self Help Inc
  
• Bellwoods Centres for Community Living Inc
• Wellington County Housing
  
  

The Solution

Redesigning Responsive Mobile and Desktop Website

We believe that by redesigning the Durham non profit housing website to be better communicated, we will be able to:

• Make the application process easier for users
  
• Improve access to information on non profit housing
• Help DRNPHC better reach their company vision.
  
  

IDEATION & BRAINSTORMING

After learning from our competition on what to gain inspiration from and what mistakes to avoid, we conducted a team ideation and brainstorming session. Each one of us talked about their ideas and discussed them with the team. This helped us come up with more ideas.

Card Sorting & Sitemap

Ideation and sorting activities were performed to determine the features and structure of our design.

Design Resources

WIREFRAMING & PROTOTYPING

Based on the defined user stories we came up with the following low-fidelity prototype, which we created three different version of our first mockups on Figma. Then we also combined our ideas to one.

Low Fi

User Testing

Since we wanted to validate and iterate on our designs, our next step was to test our low-fidelity prototype with users that fit our target audience. We created a user testing, in which we had laid out 3 tasks for the users to perform and we received constructive feedbacks from our them.

UI  Style Guide

After building a style tile, we made changes and adjusted it into a UI style guide. This allowed us to finalize our design ideas, and apply consistency across our website.

A/B Testing

We have conducted AB testing where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random and analyzed statistics to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

A

B

HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

Based on what we had learned in the user testing, we made iterations to the low-fidelity screens and moved on to the high-fidelity phase. In this we were going to add a visual layer to our wires and bring the product to life.