A beaten path to housing knowledge: financial preparation and sharing successful immigrant stories
Team
Aedan McCall: User Research (Facilitator, Observer, Protocol Designer), Blog Post Author/Editor, UX Design (Ideating, Sketching)
Emma Sadjo: User Research (Facilitator, Observer, Protocol Designer), Blog Post Author/Editor, UX Design (Ideating, Sketching, Storyboarding)
Leah Tran: User Research (Observer, Note-taker, Protocol Designer), Blog Post Author/Editor, UX Design (Ideating, Sketching, Storyboarding)
The First Step
Our process started with our group’s shared interest in addressing issues with the housing process in the United States. Given our initial theme of “designing for diversity”, we decided to focus on immigrants in particular. There are many intricacies involved with purchasing housing for the first time. These complexities range from getting a mortgage and having the right credit rating to finding the place that meets one’s needs at all with help from real estate experts.
These issues are confounded by a lack of familiarity with the US and how these systems work. The ways systems of oppression like white supremacy can in either large or small ways make it more difficult to find trustworthy experts to assist in the process. The combination of these two factors led our group to focus on immigrants in particular. While these issues have an impact on everyone in the US who seeks housing, whether born in the country’s borders or outside of them, immigrants to the US are more likely to have less support and background knowledge.
The Destination
Once we gained clarity through the first step, we began on a journey to see how we could assist immigrants to the US who are looking to buy their first house by guiding them through the process. Based on our design research, the main motivation of this project is to provide immigrants with a way to build trust in the system through connections with others who have prior experience and knowledge of the process. Our solution works to leverage community-based systems to reinforce existing bodies of knowledge and expertise among immigrant communities to help build trust throughout the housing process, foster relationships, and strengthen resilience. The ideal destination of this project is to contribute to a much larger effort of subverting systems of oppression and their harmful impacts on immigrants seeking housing in the US.
Seeing the Sights
User Interviews and Personal Inventory Survey
After meeting several times to decide what would allow us to get the best information on our potential users, we arrived at a combination of interviews and a personal inventory survey. We also tailored our questions to encourage our interviewees to convey firsthand accounts of going through a house hunt. We chose these two strategies because they allow for enough flexibility to probe deeper into the problems people dealt with. Additionally, personal inventories are a good way to understand how existing options people have available succeed or fail to meet their needs. However, we made many changes to our research design along the way in order to get meaningful results.
Recruiting and Broadening of Research Scope
Our original focus was on the largest immigrant population in the Greater Seattle Area — Mexicans, from which we expanded our user group to those who identified as Latinx. We wanted to learn from immigrants who had recently been through the process. We had narrowed down the user group to avoid making generalizations about various immigrant experiences but eventually needed to expand our focus to the immigrant population in general due to difficulties in getting responses.
The initial plan was to call and email non-profit Latinx organizations that provided housing-related services in the Greater Seattle Area then ask for interviews and survey distribution. However, we were met with resistance and ended up not getting any responses.
At this point, we pivoted to recruiting immigrants from around the world who had been residing in the US for varying lengths of time. Due to time constraints, our participants ended up being loosely connected to the same social circle, and thus not representative of the vast immigrant user group.
After recruiting participants, we conducted user interviews with eight adults who had immigrated to the US between the late 1980s and early 2000s, with the majority of participants coming to the US in the late 1990s. The majority of participants were in their 40s to 50s, with the youngest participants being in their late 30s. Participants came to the US from a variety of countries around the world including Algeria, China, India, Nigeria, Portugal, Togo, and Vietnam. Most participants had purchased their latest house in the past ten years within the greater Seattle area, with the two most prominent time frames being 2014–2015 and 2018–2021. However, one participant did purchase their most recent house in the early 2000s, and a few participants live in other cities scattered throughout the US.
The purpose of the user interviews was to understand participants’ past experiences with the housing search process within the US, observing the processes they went through, the people and resources involved, what factors they considered, challenges and frustrations they faced, as well as what worked well in the process across their housing search experiences. The interviews also involved retrospection back into participants’ first experiences buying a house to reflect on what could have helped them at the time based on what they know now.
In addition to the user interviews, we also conducted online research to build upon and broaden our understanding of the challenges immigrants face in the US within the housing search process.
Where We Ended Up
Main themes
Based on participants’ accounts of their recent and past experiences with the housing search process, five common insights began to emerge. When reflecting on their initial experiences with housing, participants highlighted a need to learn how to build up their finances to buy or build a house, touching on topics such as building credit and income.
Some participants also recounted past experiences where they felt singled out in the process because of their ethnicity and immigrant background. One participant recalled being asked by banks and other involved parties for additional paperwork without transparency for the justifications around these requests. Another participant described instances where they felt judged based on their accent and broken English. One participant also talked about being faced with workers’ skepticism of their ability to follow through with payments, repeatedly asking if they wanted to move forward with the contracts.
Many people also underlined the importance of doing research beforehand to understand the process of buying a house to ensure they weren’t taken advantage of and to increase their chances of finding a home that meets their desires within the best deals. The people we talked to all had very clear ideas of what they were looking for in a house, with commonly emphasized key factors including staying within their set price range, finding a house within a specific area (e.g., specific neighborhood, close to work), having a good community, and ensured safety of their kids and family.
Lastly, across the eight user interviews, participants described the importance of having trustworthy connections that can help guide you through the process. Participants described how they took in the advice of friends and family who had already been through the process, and found experts, such as realtors, through the recommendations of friends and family. Some participants also described searching for houses on the market through word of mouth as a supplementary avenue beyond online and in-person searches.
Tasks
In the next step of the process, we examined those themes and found a broad range of tasks that our participants highlighted in the housing searching process, which are listed below:
- Building a credit history and preparing financially
- Preparing documentation needed to acquire housing (e.g., for a landlord, bank)
- Finding experts who will be there during the process
- Finding housing within a specific time frame
- Finding housing that meets their needs while staying within their budget
- Doing research to learn about different aspects of the process (e.g., credit, mortgage, areas to live in)
Summary
After reflecting on the research and discussing our decision to pivot with the course staff, we chose to focus on building trust between immigrants and the housing experts they consult along with building credit. We felt comfortable narrowing down our tasks to these two because most of our research participants brought up some form of these problems.
Due to limited connections and resources, completing these tasks can be a greater challenge for immigrants in particular. Building credit through peers or family members who are already established in the country is not a guarantee for everyone arriving in the US for the first time. Furthermore, existing routes for building credit, such as having a credit card, lending circles, or holding a steady job, are often harder to utilize without citizenship status or connections that were mentioned prior.
Finding trustworthy experts as someone with a limited local support network is also more difficult, as getting comfortable with the laws, regulations and general best practices in an unfamiliar country is complicated. Though there are existing tools for understanding how real estate agents performed, none of them are specifically designed to help immigrants who do not already have a good understanding of a standard house hunt in the US.
Finally, both building credit and finding trustworthy experts to assist with the housing search are more prevalent in the early stages of the process. While they can often be a recurring issue, we chose to treat them as something that is settled before users can move forward with the rest of their housing journeys. These further steps, including mortgage approval and actually closing out the housing deal, are something that good credit and a helpful real estate agent can facilitate as well, so choosing not to directly support them does not cost much in the overall value of our design.
Forging a Trail Ahead
When we finished going over the data we collected, we decided on utilizing the beaten path of other immigrants’ stories to guide first-time homebuyers through the process. Our research indicated that our user group was comfortable with technology, so we could comfortably work on a design that was an app or website.
The design focuses on sharing successful, user-submitted housing search stories, with details about the resources and people involved as well as any obstacles or setbacks during the process. From these stories, users can use this information to guide them through the process by adding them to their own plan, where they can also add tidbits of information that they’ve learned and resources they used. By managing the details of their search, they can also keep track of information like their credit score and documentation they need throughout the process. Once their housing search has been completed, they can edit and submit their story for others to read and learn from their experience.
Below is a sketch detailing the main functionalities of our design:
From the tasks that we identified earlier, we narrowed them down and refined them to the two we wanted to address:
- Building credit and preparing financially to buy a house
- Finding experts who can help and provide guidance throughout the process
The storyboards below illustrate how a user can utilize our design to accomplish these tasks.
Building credit and preparing financially to buy a house
Our design shares the successes and struggles that others went through to provide guidance to the user. The app becomes a resource in our users’ learning journeys, as they search for advice on how to become financially ready for a new home.
Finding experts who can help and provide guidance throughout the process
Since our research indicated that immigrants relied on their connections to get the help they needed throughout the housing process, we wanted to broaden the sharing of information. Those who may not have a community to rely on or need more perspectives to make a decision can utilize our app to view suggestions from other users who have gone through a similar experience to them.
Conclusion
Immigrants to the US encounter issues in the housing searching process that stem from or are intensified due to their background and lack of knowledge. Due to this gap in knowledge, they need to put in the extra effort to understand and learn a system that is likely different from what they have experienced in their home country.
Our interviews with immigrants who have been through this process revealed that utilizing connections and doing plenty of research to find guidance and gather information on unfamiliar concepts like credit was crucial in the success of past housing searches. Thus, we decided to focus on the tasks of (1) providing guidance with credit and finances, and (2) finding experts to seek help in various stages of the process.
Our design aims to connect immigrants to trustworthy resources that make the housing process feel more manageable. For first-time homebuyers, in particular, we want to provide them with much-needed guidance in the convoluted system of the US housing market and give them a chance to support others.
