Business Opportunity
HOTB was successful in producing software that saved millions of people’s homes (and earned millions in revenue) during the financial crisis of 2008. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting government assistance programs across all 50 states offered a similar opportunity to produce market-leading software and potentially land several huge contracts with US state governments.
⭐️ The Goal
Win state contracts by…
being the first to market with a powerful, promising minimum viable product (MVP).
demonstrating agility, flexibility, and a high tolerance for short changing deadlines.
producing a templated product which could be sold and customized to many different states but maintain one code base, which would save our team time and money to later spend on powerful feature enhancements.
⏱️ Duration
MVP (0-1): March 2021 → May 2021
Maintenance: May 2021 → Ongoing (2+ years)
👯 Team
Lead Product Designer (Me)
Lead Development Manager / Product Owner
Company President
3 Developers
👩💻 Users
Members of State Governments
Processors & Underwriters
Homeowners and Renters across the Country
Bank, Servicer Employees
🧠 Challenges
Extremely limited time, budget, and resources to get to MVP.
All users of this system would be non-technically-savvy. (Need bullet-proof UX.)
All users of this system would be using it because had to, not because they wanted to. (Already frustrated users!)
The nature of government software required us to adapt to urgent changing requirements and requests with little to no notice.
Each state client required unique branding and extensive customization.
No product owner. (Just me and the Development Manager.)
🏆 Results
Won 14 contracts with US states, even stole one from another software provider who the state was disappointed with.
Processed millions of applications throughout the United States and distributed millions of dollars of government assistance funding to applicants. In the state of Alabama alone, by February 2023, $78,157,989 were awarded to 3,880 households.
Dozens of handwritten testimonials from applicants whose homes were saved by this program and the web application that supported it.
Due to HOTB’s experience producing software for the mortgage industry, we were given the opportunity to build a set of tools for the US states of Georgia and Mississippi. These tools would intake public applications for state-wide rental relief programs, Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA), and process those applications for underwriting and distribution of funds.
It needed:
Three web portals: the landlord applicant side, the tenant applicant side, and the processor side, all distinct user types with subsets of user types within each, their own workflows, and differing competence using a computer.
The ability to quickly and cheaply adapt to urgent changing requirements and requests by states, adding unforeseen features and updates when necessary. (Building an airplane while it’s in the air!)
With no budget, time, or precedent for standard UX research, I was given only a limited product brief and about two weeks to work closely with my manager to design a complete MVP for an extremely complex set of systems.
To satisfy the requirements of Georgia and Mississippi, as well as land other major contracts with states, we leaned into our competitive advantage which was SPEED and AGILITY in the face of urgent changing requirements with little to no warning.
Traditional government software providers are slow to accommodate these kinds of hiccups. This would set us apart.
After several all-hands-on-deck marathon design sessions, we were able to present my Figma file to stakeholders in Georgia and Mississippi who gave the thumbs up for development.
🏆
Our team was able to get the products successfully launched in weeks.
This greatly outperformed our competitors and impressed other states who were just about to launch another similar initiative.
Quickly, we received a new opportunity to build a set of tools for a new program which could have far greater reach — the Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF). This program would instead target homeowners living in their homes, and potentially be much more complex. This opened the door for us to immediately gather everything we learned from the creation and release of the ERA product and start over fresh. All 50 states were up for grabs! To effectively scale and win those contracts, many new solutions to old problems would need to be introduced.
From producing and releasing Georgia and Mississippi’s ERA tools, we learned several lessons that would help us improve HAF.
👨👩👧
Visibility of system status — or lack thereof. (Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Heuristic #1.) It wasn’t clear at a glance what the status of their application was, what the next step was, and who or what they were waiting on. This was crucially important as some of these users were facing eviction!
Inability to find the information and processes they needed due to sloppy information architecture as a result of light-speed MVP design and feature add-ons.
👨🏾💼
Limited feature set. This MVP only had what they absolutely needed.
Every tiny change required a developer. Client-side customization tools did not exist. Even something as small as a copy change on the public landing page required them to request it through us and wait for a developer to do the work which could be weeks.
👨🏽💼
Chaos in too many requests. With no ability for clients to customize anything themselves, they needed to take all of the feedback and turn it into action items for the development team, a complex game of telephone which often led to mistakes.
👩🏽💻
Two different frustratingly similar but unique code-bases. Updates to one did not carry over to the other so all site-wide feature updates needed to be done twice! This would not scale if we were looking at winning a double-digit number of state contracts.
Enormous tech debt as a result of urgent short-term-thinking.
🙋🏻♀️
Enormous design debt as a result of urgent short-term-thinking. None of the features appear to go together. It was laid out poorly because things were released one-by-one instead of all at once. Since people were actively using it, a design overhaul was out of the question. By the end, the whole product felt like a mess.
I asked myself how might we introduce some system-level solutions which would reduce all of our stakeholders pain points?
❌
Many States = Many Separate Code-Bases
✅
Many States = One Templated Code-Base
❌
Short-Term "Band-Aid Solution" Thinking
✅
Long-term Scalable Thinking
❌
Developer Required for Customization
✅
Powerful, User-Led Customization
❌
Poor Visibility of System Status
✅
Clear, Actionable Display of Status and Upcoming Steps
From here on, I made sure to operate in pursuit of these goals.
The HAF application would have a complex network of user types, each with unique goals and pain points. We created this diagram in FigJam.
Think Big: Theming & Configuration that Scales
The public-facing landing pages were costing our development team a disproportionate amount of labor.To better smooth over the process on onboarding new states and setting up their websites, we decided to limit their options and present them more clearly.I created a set of configurable “blocks” which states could choose to create their landing pages.This reduced the amount of work required by me, the designer, and the customer service representatives who were tasked with collecting the information from states for each landing page.View fullsize
We also invented a section called App Config where admin-level users could do many things to customize their own application, including…Write new copy which would affect the public landing page.Create checklists which their processors and underwriters would use.Input all the data to populate various dropdown selectors within applicant forms.Much more!
Think Ahead: Reports, Version History, & Audit Logs
Due to legal requirements from multiple different regulating agencies, the tool needed to include…
Robust reporting capabilities
A history of all save events by all processors and underwriters on all applications so the work can be effectively tracked and audited.
Think Like A Bank: Common Data Files (CDF) & Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
The Common Data File process — used by banks for accepting and distributing funds to applicants — was an extremely tough one for me to get my head around. This was an area most of our competitors opted to skip, or offload to the standard email-and-paper workflow. Building this into our tool put us far ahead of the competition.
But we went one step further. We also created a third tool, the Servicer Portal, where banks could log in themselves and drop off files through an SFTP server (like a native Filezilla) where HAF processors could immediately access them.
Our in-house processing team literally jumped for joy when this feature was released, saving them countless hours and messy back-and-forth file emails to banks.
🏆
The design of each landing page reflects the way each state government team has chosen to customize it themselves.
Click the program logo to see the live landing page and application portal!
