Helping Hesitant Homebuyers

Introduction

As is the case in any capitalist country, owning a home and/or land is the most significant source of wealth. If not for my grandparents’ decision to buy a modest home in a lower-middle-class community (where they raised my mother and uncle), it’s unlikely I would have enjoyed nearly as many advantages.

My family has never owned stocks or taken lavish vacations, but I never had to worry about food or any other necessities. When my grants and loans didn’t cover all my college expenses, my mother’s savings filled the gap. There was even enough to send me on life-changing study abroad trips.

Years later, when both of us were strapped for cash, we refinanced the house, which enabled me to pay off my car and student loans. This is not possible for renters.

Of course, those who aren’t fortunate enough to own homes do not simply decide not to own because they don’t want to be responsible for repairs and insurance — many over the years have simply not have access to this essential source of wealth. And, in many cases, this was due to race.

My grandparents happened to be white.

I bring this up because this project for me is about more than helping a friend (and client) design a better website. It’s about more than flexing my user research and design muscles. It’s about social justice. It’s about economic justice. This is a large country with a lot of land. Every responsible adult should have access to homeownership, and financial security should not be a dream — but a reality. Full stop.

The Project

While housing justice for all is the end game, it won’t happen overnight. I tried to play my part in the larger mission by assisting the efforts of a nonprofit organization called HomeFree-USA. As you may have noticed from the screenshot above, HomeFree needs a new website (Note: It likely already has one that is MUCH better. My work on this project ended in 2019.) A lot of small nonprofits need new websites.

Nonprofits don’t typically have large budgets for such things, so not only do they depend on old websites with outdated designs, but they also struggle to update and expand their content. Plus, they often can’t afford a UXer — even if they wanted one. That's where I came in: I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I was passionate about the mission AND about UX.

Special thanks to AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) for its mentorship and support on this project.

My Role

I couldn’t call myself a “UX professional” at the time because when I began the project, I was still enrolled in General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive program. (My first full-time UX job wouldn’t come until early 2020.) However, I had enough baseline UX knowledge to advise the director of marketing at HomeFree in four key areas, one of which is more marketing than UX, admittedly:

1. User research methods (specifically focus groups)
2. User-friendly website content (based on an organizational style guide AND results from user research)
3. Story-based branding (I had just read Donald Miller’s book on the subject and thought it aligned perfectly with HomeFree’s mission)
4. Personas and journey maps (no additional explanation needed at this time)

While I did not consider myself an expert in any of these areas, I had credibility as an outsider and potential homebuyer — who needed more convincing that it was attainable and desirable than the average HomeFree client. My writing background also helped me get my foot in the door. As a former journalist, I understood the power of a good style guide.

Style Guide

The style guide was proprietary, so I can’t showcase it here. I will point out, however, that this is an overlooked tool that isn’t nearly as boring or restrictive as it sounds. I worked for a few newspapers as a college student, and they all had style guides to some extent — so I was shocked to learn that other organizations that communicate regularly with the public did NOT have them. (I interned and then worked for one that did not.)

The result was as you might expect: Poor consistency in messaging, and a lot of tonal mixing. The executive director, for example, may write in a more formal style, while that of the director of communications is informal. One might also use different domain-specific terminology than the other. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but what if companies that provide important services did this? Would you trust a telecom company of it referred to its offerings in different ways depending on who happened to write the marketing email that day? And you certainly wouldn’t want the bill to use different terminology from one month to the next.

I believe strongly that every organization that communicates with the public should do so with a consistent voice. A big step toward this is creating a style guide. Enforcing it, however, is another matter…

Focus Groups

I learned quickly that HomeFree collects plenty of useful data on their clients, and its staff always tries to get to know clients on a personal level for both business and altruistic reasons.

Nonetheless, it takes a lot more time to get to know a diverse group of clients, and institutional biases can lead to blinders. For example, someone who has advised lower-income homebuyers for years will start to group clients together in ways that an outsider (like myself) will not. Perhaps this hypothetical advisor made his living off of a certain type of client and is not as concerned about other types.

Focus groups are an imperfect method, but they can certainly provide a window into the lives, motivations, and preferences of people looking to buy a home for the first time. In the context of HomeFree, the director of marketing and I were surprised at how vocal the clients were — they seemed to have no problem speaking freely around other clients. They were very direct about what information they needed from the website (and other sources) that wasn’t there or hard to find, and they pointed out domain-specific language that wasn’t clear to them.

The focus groups in practice were less structured than I would have liked them to be. I also would have liked them better if no HomeFree staff had attended — but my objection that this would make clients feel less comfortable offering critiques was overruled by said staff. In the end I was proud to introduce a method of gathering client feedback that had not previously been attempted.

Roadmap

I don’t consider myself a project manager, even though I believe I have stronger organizational skills than the average person. Looking at project and product roadmaps tends to give me anxiety. However, it gives me MORE anxiety if I find out an organization lacks a roadmap of some sort. There simply MUST be a visual representation of timelines, deadlines, and the work ahead — or something will inevitably go wrong. Let’s face it: Things will go wrong anyway. But at least with a roadmap, it’s easier to make adjustments to accommodate delays and other inevitable issues. It’s easier to keep the big picture in mind.

Thus, I was proud to introduce this concept to HomeFree in the context of its website redesign.

Storybranding

While this falls more under marketing than UX, after reading Donald Miller’s book Building a StoryBrand, I was inspired by the connection between storytelling and brand loyalty. It had not occurred to me that companies could effectively position themselves as the wise sage or guide on a hero’s (customer’s) journey. At first it might seem corny, but it’s a brilliant way of avoiding a traditional sales pitch.

This same kind of approach is what got me into UX in the first place because I didn’t see myself as buying an expensive product or service (UX education and certification) as much as I saw myself as going on a long journey from painful unemployment to elusive career success. And for this I needed a guide — several, in fact.

I thought HomeFree was missing a huge opportunity by not taking advantage of the hero-story approach. As much as I have soured on the American Dream, it still resonates with a lot of people — both here and abroad. And what is more symbolic of the American Dream than owning a (large) home?

The copy writes itself: Everyone who successfully buys his or her first home is a successful American Dreamer, and HomeFree’s advisors are the wise sages who make this possible.

Personas

Personas are becoming more and more popular and controversial it seems. I regret not having time to create comprehensive personas, but I was able to build a proto-persona of HomeFree’s target demographic.

I did this with the hope that someone else would pick up the mantle and identify personas that are (even more) underserved — since that is on-brand for an organization that serves first-time homebuyers.

I did not want my persona development to be merely a marketing exercise to identify the biggest “market.” This is where UX diverges sharply from marketing because designing for the minority often does extend to the majority — but this is often not true the other way around.

I felt strongly that HomeFree’s website, especially, should be designed with the most marginalized potential homebuyer in mind — maybe even someone with low-literacy and/or fear of making any major purchase.

Client Journeys

If I had more time, I would have taken the next step (into client journey mapping). I would have, especially, marked all the places where a client persona would interact with HomeFree’s website. This would allow HomeFree to create additional content where necessary — and potentially cut content that is superfluous.

Not every persona will use the website in the same way: The amount of time spent, the pages visited, the number of staff contacted will all vary. In an ideal world, this would all be carefully documented and updated in conjunction with client demographic data. This would help the organization prioritize smaller improvements to the website while helping to determine the general focus of the redesign.

My Impact

The most important impact was the learning that took place on both sides. I stand by this assessment — but for the purposes of my portfolio, I’d be a fool not to toot my own horn a little bit:

1. I created the first-ever style guide in the history of HomeFree. (I was shocked that no one had created one before.)
2. I introduced the first-ever focus groups as a method of improving HomeFree’s website content and marketing materials
3. I introduced product development concepts, such as a product roadmap, and UX concepts, such as personas and journeys