The Santa Clara County Housing Authority (SCCHA) is the largest provider of affordable housing assistance in the county, helping low-income families with their rental housing.
After helping to lessen the burden for public housing tenants through a digital solution, the Santa Clara County Housing Authority (SCCHA) came to Daylight once again looking to improve their administrative process for the case workers.
Through 11 months of collaboration, we helped develop a MTP (Most Testable Product) version of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool dedciated for SCCHA's administrative processes and a fully defined design system and page templates.
Lead UX Designer
Santa Clara County Housing Authority (SCCHA)
Jan, 2021 - Nov, 2021
When solving a problem, there are always multiple layers of underlying causes, making it even more important to listen to everyone involved in the process. At Daylight, we had the advantage of being a third-party consultant, enabling us to better understand the situation by considering both our clients and their intended audiences.
When initially working with SCCHA to address the public housing burden for tenants, Daylight and two other trusted partners came together to create Tenant Portal—a digital tool that allowed people to manage their housing information and documents online. While this tool proved highly helpful especially during the COVID-19 period, we realized part of the issue stemmed from the overwhelming workload and burnout experienced by housing specialists.
Tenant Portal — a digital tool to enable families to streamline their process of accessing housing assitance.
As we continued to improve Tenant Portal, we sought to streamline SCCHA’s internal administrative processes. We spent time talking to various housing specialists and assistants, studying their operating manuals, and mapping out each of their processes. Through this research, we discovered a lack of organization for requests and paper documents. As a result, we aimed to create a centralized task and document management system to help specialists stay on top of their workloads—an initiative we called Autumn
From software manual, request forms, to coverage protocols, we studied all the relevenant information so they could be accurately reflected within our design.
From our qualitative research, we know that specialists who are successful at their job often excel at organizing their tasks and documents. Thus, our goal was to enable everyone to do that through a digtial platform.
From our research, we discovered more than 20 processes, which would require hundreds of screens to capture them all. That’s when we decided to create a custom design system, dedicated to Autumn, to ensure consistency across all designs and to better facilitate the transition of their existing workflows into the digital world.
A custom design system I created to enable our team to build a consistent user experience for the different processes at SCCHA.
Below, is a snapshot of page templates I created to help streamline our design process. Throughout the project, we continued to iterate these templates based on the feedbacks from the specialists at SCCHA.
For interface that we use repeatatively throughout the workflows, templates are a great way to streamline our design process.
A major aspect of having a design system is creating custom components that capture the essence of how people operate in the real world. For the people at SCCHA, this meant a dashboard experience capable of organizing and managing all the tenant requests assigned to them. This required us to understand key information releveant to these cases and how they should be grouped and ordered.
From talking to the specialists, we learned that the type of transactions is the most important factor, followed by their individual urgency and due dates. From typography and iconography to visual hierarchy, I used these findings to refine my design and created custom ticket card and various dashboard templates with different grouping and ordering mechanisms.
Custom components like Tickets allowed us to tailor the user experience to how they actually work in the physical world.
Using the custom components, we created different templates to to test out their usability through real context.
Below is a page template for SCCHA's office assistant to intake new documents. With multi-layered components, I enabled other designers to swap out content as needed and efficiently build their workflows.
Multi-layered components enabled designers to swap content easily at different scales.
Upon accessing an individual ticket, we knew it was key to gather all the relevant information needed for case workers to perform their tasks. To achieve this, we incorporated a cloud-based system to store all documents and access key data from the government-regulated software named Elite. By centralizing this information in one place, we created a Ticket Page that includes Ticket Details, Entity Info, and an Activity Log, empowering specialists and assistants to process requests without needing to switch back and forth between other tools.
Ticket Page serves as the all-in-one place where case workers could access relevant document and information to process the ticket.
Using Autumn, we were able to create experiences that adapted to SCCHA's existing processes. By listening to all the stakeholders involved, our design considered each step, both within and outside the platform. From reassigning tickets among case workers to processing a denied request, we developed various user flows as well as interactive prototypes to demonstrate the experience but also ensure every step is in compliance to their prototcols.
Following SCCHA's coverage prototcol, I created an interactive prototype to demonstrate how supervisor could reassign cases for when staffs are out of office.
An example workflow of how a denial letter for a request gets processed. I mapped out the experience in details and included all the stakeholders' perspectives.
Above was just a few examples. With the use of our design system, we were able to transform countless more of their workflows into the digital world. The collaboration with SCCHA lasted for 11 months. The result was a MTP (Most Testable Product) version of Autumn along with a set of MVP designs to the client. If you'd like to learn more about the project, feel free to reach out!