Digital Lead/ Senior User Researcher

This was an all one in role where we worked for 13 months on developing a digital estate agency service which would help local authorities and housing associations recycle/ and better match their accessible housing stock to customers with accessibility issues. 

We spent close to a year working as UX Consultants for Incommunities, which is one of the biggest housing associations in the country with over 23000 homes. The project was to work on a new standalone digital service which aimed to solve one of the biggest problems facing the housing sector outside a shortage of homes, which was the lack of adapted homes.

 

I started work with Incommunities pre-discovery, leading the work from inception and highlighting the need for a digital service, which would advertise properties for rent and sale that had been adapted for disabled people. This would mean the tens of thousands of pounds each of those properties had received in public money for adapting those properties would not go to waste by providing a service where customers with similar mobility requirements could be matched more effectively and take advantage of those adaptations.

 

We were responsible for doing the User Research, producing the road map, prioritising user stories and wire framing the digital service ready for the front end devs to code.  

 

We we were also responsible for prioritising business requirements and user needs to develop the MVP, writing the user stories, capturing requirements and prioritising them in agreement with the project’s stakeholders.

Some of the key value propositions we brought were:

1. Providing a clear vision for the service which would lead to us developing a sustainable, income generating service which could sustain itself. The vision for the service was to develop it as a standalone service which through a subscription based model would allow other local authorities, housing associations and charities advertise and manage their accessible units through one portal. This vision and model was key for the service getting the green light into Alpha.
2. Developing an MVP and a High Level road map: that intersected with the to-be service blue print which highlighted how the service could leverage existing services/ back end processes to reduce development time, refactoring and duplication of processes.
3. Embed user centric design: incorporating user needs and user centric design as a key requirement when not only formulating and prioritising the road map but in creating effective user stories which had a clear definition of definition of done and acceptance criteria and understanding the difference between both.