USHS Housing
Management Platform
Enhancing volunteer efficiency for United Station Homeless Services by transforming spreadsheets into a streamlined web portal
Role
Team
Duration
UI/UX Designer
November 2023 — May 2024
1 PM, 3 Designers,
7 Developers
On any given night, more than 75,000 people experience homelessness in LA County, and one of the main root cause of homelessness is due to the lack of affordable housing.
As a tech-for-good student organization on campus, Triton Software Engineering collaborates with NPOs. For this project, we worked with the United Station Homeless Services. Their mission is to end homelessness through dignity, ensuring all individuals and families will have a safe place they call home.
Context
The Homeless Population
Our Client
Helping USHS better serve the community
The Challenge
Poor data management limits housing solutions
USHS’s current system of manual data entry, complex spreadsheets, and email referrals lead to inefficiency, miscommunication, and as a result, undermines their ability to effectively match prospective tenants with housing.
Snapshot of previous excel sheet for managing housing data
Our Solution
A platform that helps streamline the housing locating and referring process
Our goal was to make the process easier for the volunteers who are matching houses with prospective tenants, enabling them to visualize housing information, manage referrals, and track current renter candidate process.
Visualize and filter suitable housing options for candidates
Quickly Manage referrals
Protected Landlord Data Entry Form
Managing Staff
Instead of going through spreadsheets and manually filtering out suitable housings, volunteers can now efficiently view listings that fit their candidates’ needs.
Referring staff can easily manage and keep track of their referrals on one page.
Landlords can submit leasing through a protected form that goes directly in the database, streamlining the entire process
Housing locators can assign housing locators through a simple click
How we got there
Picking up the pieces through research
User Interviews
We conducted user interviews with staff and volunteers at USHS to better understand their pain points when using their current system. By guiding an open discussion, we gathered three main pain points:
1.
Manual data collection and entry are time-consuming, error-prone, and reduce overall efficiency.
2.
Searching and filtering through large spreadsheets is unintuitive and require prior expertise.
3.
Referring renter candidates via emails led to unclear status tracking and often caused confusion
Competitive Analysis
With such a complex project at hand, we decided to start our research by doing competitive analysis to familiarize ourselves with the renting process.
Through this process, we were able to identify functions that were helpful to our ideation. For example, all three platforms uses a drop down filter menu on the unit browsing page. On the other hand, the UCSD housing portal provided a glimpse of how uploading listings could look like.
Ideation
Addressing user pain points with product features
Feature Scoping
User flow
At TSE, we utilize agile development. With their pain points in mind, we identified the key features that we should prioritize
Since we’re trying to fit so many functions into a platform, it was important for us to simplify the steps and break down this complex product
MVP
home page
landlord form
unit page
creating referrals
profile page
High priority, most feasible
V2
pictures for units
advanced filters
exporting data
referral page
Low priority, less feasible
Home Page
View Listings
Search/Filtering
Export Unit Info
Delete/Add Unit
Approve Listings
Functions for both housing locator + Reerring staff
Functions For Housing Locator Only
Profile
Assign Admin Power
Unit Specific Page
Make Referral
Manage Referrals
Change Availability
Referral Page
Edit Referring Staff
Manage Client Info
Login
Filters Design Decisions
Filter was a vital component of the home page. With functional and intuitive filters, referring staff would be able to match suitable housing with someone in need effectively. As USHS, they want to make sure the housing they find for their client suits every criteria. This led to 28 filter options that had to be easily accessible.
Pop-up Filter
Collapsable side bar filter
Side bar filter
Dropdown Filter
“Have to go through extra clicks each time”
“Will need to click on each dropdown”
“Clear, straightforward, only need to scroll”
“Hard to read, too many extra steps”
Iterations
Seeing beyond our design box
We conducted an internal A/B user testings with 13 other designers to refine our ideas.
Iterations
The Results
✅ Our product received a 100% client satisfaction rate
🚀 We successfully handed off our V2 designs in May, and the platform shipped in
Summer 2024
Completing the USHS housing platform as my first 0-to-1 product was a deeply rewarding experience. Over six months, I gained invaluable insights into the nuances of design handoff to developers and the dynamic discussions that arise when balancing technical constraints with design priorities. This internal portal was a complex and challenging project, pushing me to grow significantly as a UX designer and equipping me with skills that I’ll carry forward in future endeavors.