Digital product & UI/UX

ECHO / Boston Housing Authority

Project overview

ECHO is a web tool developed by the Boston Housing Authority to assist low income families searching for housing. When I came to the project, its site and branding were outdated and difficult to use, the biggest issue being that there wasn’t a functional mobile site.

Details

Company / client: Boston Housing Authority

Role: UI/UX designer

Direct collaborators: 1 other designer

Team: UX specialist, software developers, copy writers, and managers

Time period: 2020

Before

After

Goals

Make the web tool more approachable, friendly, and easy to use by updating its layout and branding.

Process

Redesigned logo, collected feedback on logo iterations from BHA employee focus groups to see if it read as approachable
Updated the brand typography, colors, and assets based on the logo
Documented this in a brand guide
Created user journey flow chart of the current website
Created mid-fidelity interactive mobile prototype for site to aid in user testing and building the site
Created wireframes and high fidelity designs for ECHO’s promotional website
Promotional website was built in collaboration with devs
Created “north stars”, a few screens from our mobile prototypes to show how the tool would ideally look with updated brand

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Challenges

Updating the branding for something attached to an established org like the BHA always comes with some resistance. We also did have constraints on how much we could modify the existing tool.

Success

We successfully updated ECHO’s branding to be more approachable, launched a promotional site, and provided in-depth designs for continuing development!