UX research case study: Malmo Civic Lab — Homeless & housing in Malmö
For the past weeks, we, (Malmo Civic Lab), have been investigating how Malmö city is matching homeless with housing, a complex area with many different needs. In this post, we want to give you insight into what we’ve discovered and how we did it.
The goal of the project was to understand how matching works today, to identify opportunities and to prototype and test solutions to these.
Understanding how matching works today
To understand how matching works today, it’s important to understand the people it’s being done by. The first thing we did was to identify the people influencing matching in the service eg. our actors.
We spend two weeks meeting and interviewing:
- 10 social secretaries
- 1 housing administrator
- 1 from the booking central
- 1 from Lagenhetsenheten
Mapping out the service
After the interviews, it was time to synthesise, to do this we mapped out the service, also called a service map. This is done to make sure we’re aligned, both the internal team and the rest of ASF. And to bring the knowledge from our heads to the walls. With insights from the actors we met, we mapped it out from the perspective of the homeless. In this case, the service map starts when the homeless enters the social office and ends when they have housing on a first-hand contract.
Opportunities
Changing users and needs
One of our main discoveries was the change of user types. The service was initially designed for social homeless and works as a staircase-solution, you basically train to be able to take over a contract. But today the users are mainly structural homeless with very different needs, which is causing frustration. This is common knowledge for most civil servants and politicians and is currently being rearranged. We don’t have enough knowledge to prototype or come with suggestions for improvement, for that we would need the homeless’ point of view.
A low hanging fruit
We always want to start small, so low hanging fruits is what we aim for. Combining the information we gathered from interviews with the numbers from ASF (Malmö Stads kartläggning av hemlösheten år 2018) it was clear there is a big opportunity to shorten the time between matching and when the client actually moves in.
From the time we match a homeless to housing today, it takes on average of 42 days before they move in. During these 42 days, the housing is empty and being paid by the city. The homeless often lives in acute housing, which on average cost 950 SEK a day, also paid by the city. In 2018 we matched 444 homeless with housing eg. 16 days x 444 homeless x 950 SEK = 6.748.800 SEK.
Of these 42 days, the first 16 is spent by the housing providers to approve the homeless. We don’t have much insight into this process yet, but we know that the housing provider receives a letter from the social service office with the client name and matched housing. The housing providers check the following:
- Internal client history; have the client lived with them before, if yes, did they behave and pay their rent in time?
- Do they have any depth to the Swedish enforcement authority?
- And possibly more things that we are not aware of yet.
Ideas and prototypes
With this in mind, we shaped the question: How might we shorten the time from 16 days to 1 for client approval by housing providers?
From this, we started developing ideas. We invited people from the tech scene and arranged a sketching session, the point is, to come up with as many ideas as possible (quantity over quality). Afterwards, we condensed them down to 5 ideas.
Validating ideas
All of these ideas are depending on Södersocialtjänsten and housing providers’ workflow and it’s therefore important that we get this clarified as soon as possible
The first thing we did was to visit Fredrik, the housing administrator at Södersocialtjänst. He gave us feedback on the ideas and his support to run tests, his main concerns was making sure that client data would be kept safe and secure and that we wouldn’t make the process harder or longer for housing providers.
With this in mind, we wanted to get feedback from the legal department in the city. We set up a meeting, went through the ideas and got their concerns on each of them. We feel comfortable we can meet the high-security standards.
Prototyping
Even though we need to get housing providers onboard before we can dig into prototyping mode, we wanted to showcase that things can be done differently. We teamed up with Fredrik and together we shortened the time getting the client information to the housing providers using a bike. Yes, a bike. Today the information is sent by letter and takes 2–4 days to arrive, we shortened it down to 10 minutes.
Next steps
Work with housing providers
- Understand workflow and test ideas with the housing providers. We are organizing a meeting with them in order to learn more about how they work and what could be improved in the procedure and to get their feedback on our ideas.
- We need to get in touch with relevant people, that are willing to share their process and possibly change it for the better.
- Start phase 2
- Phase 2 is getting the perspective of the homeless, in order to:
- Get the full-service picture both from city and citizens perspective. We want to figure out opportunities for the improvements of the service experience.
- Identify the different needs from the two user groups; social -and structural-homeless. Which can be used to propose a new and better service for the future.
We need to meet homeless in emergency, temporary and long-term housing to understand their experience with our service, what works wells and where there is room for improvement.
But what about matching?
The initial ask was for us to look into how we match homeless with housing. After talking to social secretaries and being part of the matching process, it’s clear that it works well as for now. There are improvements to be done, but we identified the efficiency benefit by lowering the wait time as higher impact. Matching could be picked up in a third phase of this project.
Thank you 💕
We want to thank everyone at ASF and at the social service offices, everyone has been so kind and helpful, offering their time and insider knowledge.
Malmö Civic Lab is an experiment by the city of Malmö to reveal ways of improving life for the citizens by prototyping using tech and design. MCL currently consists of Måns Adler, Timo Engelhardt and myself.
