Intro

The scourge of homelessness is an epidemic in America .

Home Unite Us is a volunteer-led project within Hack for LA , I am working with community non-profits who have a Host Home initiative to develop a workflow management tool to make the process scaleable (across all providers), reduce institutional bias, and effectively capture data.

Host Home programs are centered around housing young people, 18 - 25 years old. Their approach focuses on low-cost, community-driven intervention by matching a willing host with a guest or group of guests, providing a stable housing environment for youths who are experiencing homelessness and seeking stable housing.

I am the part of the Calendaring Team.The purpose of this service is to help participants manage their scheduled meetings, a key component of the matching process.

Goal

Increase success in moving people through the matching process.
Prevent candidate drop off for hosts and guests by making a smoother experience.
Increase the speed and efficiency of caseworkers in the number of cases they can close.

Pain Points

It’s difficult for organizations to deal with the high number of applicants while using their current paper system.
Caseworkers need a more streamlined approach to effectively schedule meetings with participants.

What already exist

We looked at other calendar services and how they managed their scheduling, like Calendly, Google Calendar, Doodle, and more. We basically want to see here what other applications are doing, and explore what interactions could be adapted to our product as well as what was out of scope for the current requirements.

User Flow

After identifying the problem, I had to understand the general task flows to account for. There were four distinct ones to tackle.

One of the main intricacies was the matching process where we needed to facilitate three parties in a singular meeting. This is a major challenge from both a design and development perspective.

Wireframing

Onboarding Screens :

Other Screens :

Reflection:

Working so closely with developers has continued to be rewarding for me. We were quickly able to understand technical limitations and design around them more effectively. However, it’s important to test frequently during the design process, and I feel we could have done more earlier to facilitate that.