In House User Discovery

Shared Housing / In-House User Discovery

General Questions

While interviewing, we’ll be asking these questions to keep the conversation/interview light at first before jumping into the targeted questions

• What’s your job title?
• How long have you been working in the shared housing space?
• Would you consider yourself tech-savvy?
• Could you give me a brief overview of what you do?

Housing Location Team

For the housing team, we might want to think about coming in for an open house or holding other discovery methods

Guided Tour

The housing location team could give us a guided tour of their workspace and, more importantly, a house they are inspecting for shared housing * Ask targeted questions about the space and how/why things are in stored in certain places * Take photos if allowed

What do we want to know?

Questions are targeting key steps they occupy in the process * [We’ll be asking all teams generic questions at the top of the document before in-depth questions]

• Identifying the units

  • How do they identify the unit now?
  • Are there channels that exist to connect them with Landlords who are interested in Shared Housing?
  • Walk us through the last time they profiled a shared space.
    • What are the most common issues you encounter when inspecting houses?
    • How are the shared spaces distributed among the location team?
  • What are the key concerns landlords might have at first with shared housing?
  • How many landlords is a typical Location Team member working with at any given time?
  • How do you measure success when it comes to identifying a unit?

• Homeless People

  • Walk me through how you encounter a new homeless person that might be interested in Shared Housing.
  • Are you involved at all if the tenant has an issue with a landlord?
  • What do you identify first, a unit that might fit homeless people or people without homes who might work well in a unit?

• Holding Open Houses

  • Who attends the open house?
  • When holding the open houses how do you know who to reach out to?
  • Walk me through the last time you held an open house.

• Landlord Relationship

  • How are the landlords identified?
  • What is the process for obtaining paperwork from the landlord, acquiring signatures, submitting/saving documents, & changes to the documents after an initial move in?
  • How does this change from when the house is becoming a shared housing environment the first time vs when one person moves out?
  • How do you measure success when it comes to maintaining a landlord relationship?

• High Level

  • What are the key problems you face throughout your process?
  • How do you coordinate with other members of the shared housing team?
  • If you had a magic wand and could change any step of the process what would it be and why?
  • What assets are collected by you and your team?
  • What are the feedback loops across your team? How about across the organization?

Housing Navigation Team

Ideally, we would be able to shadow a navigation team member to see the process of identifying homeless compatibility first hand

Guided Tour

The housing navigator team could give us a guided tour of their workspace * Ask targeted questions about the space and how/why things are in stored in certain places * Take photos if allowed * We are essentially designing for these people

What do we want to know?

Questions are targeting key steps they occupy in the process * [We’ll be asking all teams generic questions at the top of the document before in-depth questions]

• Working with people on streets

  • What does it mean to identify someone in need of housing? Are there other services you direct people towards?
  • Do tenants receive financial subsidies?
  • Is there a pre-qualification process?
  • Walk me through the last person you met who was on the streets and you put into shared housing.
  • How do you drive interest for units or the shared housing objective from people on the streets?
  • What is the pitch and reception from people on the streets?
  • Is there a problem with demand?

• Payment Files

  • What documents are you responsible for along the shared housing process?
    • How are these files stores and distributed?
  • How do you identify if homeless people are capable of paying for rent?
    • What happens if they do not pay rent?

• High Level

  • How do you measure success when it comes to identifying people on the streets for shared housing?
  • How do you measure whether or not two shared housing participants are compatible with one another?
  • What are the key problems you face throughout your process?
  • If you had a magic wand and could change any step of the process what would it be and why?
  • What is success and/or failure to you? How about to the organization? Who determines if something is a success or a failure?
  • What is the criteria you use now for matching?
  • Are there any systems that you use now?

Housing Stabilization Team

For housing stabilization we should consider accompanying them on a visit to an existing shared house

What do we want to know?

• Stable Housing

  • At what point are you contacted along the way of the shared housing process?
  • How do you monitor the housing environment?
  • What are the key problems you face along the way of monitoring housing stabilization?

• High Level

  • If you had a magic wand and could change any step of the process what would it be and why?
  • How would you define success in terms of a shared housing environment?

#shared-housing/Interview-Prompt