Staff UX Researcher

 My team members were Adrienne, Thomas, Richard, Catalina, and Lillian. We worked collaboratively and divided up tasks among the six of us – for example, we conducted six interviews and each of us took the part of interviewer, note-taker, and transcriber at least once. Additionally, I was responsible for the document design.  

In this project, my team wanted to gain an understanding of the different situations that many applicants face when trying to find affordable housing in order to improve the experience. To that end, we conducted domain research and interviews, distributed surveys, and created models and diagrams to represent our findings. 

We conducted seven interviews in total; 3 expert interviews and 4 contextual inquiries. "Expert" interviews were those with people who had higher level knowledge about the process: someone who worked at a non-profit helping applicants through the process, a landlord participating in the Section 8 program, and the director of the Housing Authority of Columbia.

Contextual inquiries were with people who had gone through or attempted to go through the Section 8 application process. These were people who the program was supposed to help; they were direct stakeholders, and the four we interviewed were LGBT youths who had gone through the process of trying to find Section 8 housing in Columbia. The diagram above is a user journey mapping out the experience of these applicants from different points of view, based on these interviews. 

  Personas we created of different stakeholders as well as a stakeholder map, based on the people we interviewed.