Tom Gieß – SyndiGuide

Overview

The tense situation on the housing market, termination for personal use or the sale to investors – this makes tenants wish they could escape this impotence. This is exactly where the concept of the Mietshäuser Syndikat (MHS) comes in: It combines the self-determination of buying a house and the flexibility of rented accommodation. As a non-commercial, solidary association of house projects, it supports groups of people in withdrawing rental properties from the housing market and converting them into common property. The Mietshäuser Syndikat advises house projects on a voluntary basis in their development, inclusion in the association and in their self-organization. In the long term, affordable, self-determined living space and a solidary alliance of house projects will be created.

The path to a self-organized house project is lengthy and labour-intensive. The web app SyndiGuide simplifies this process. Consultants can organize and visualize the next work steps individually. With SyndiGuide, consultants and founders can work together and orientate themselves more easily. In this way, they always know which tasks are currently pending in your housing project.

Goal

Make the individual consulting process organisable, documentable and visible for all participants in order to relieve consultants and to take project initiatives by hand

Participants

Tom Gieß (bachelor thesis)

Support

Robert (IT Department MHS)
Prof. Tina Glückselig (MSD)
Prof. Daniel Braun (MSD)

My Tasks

User Research
UX Conception
Visual Design
Prototyping

Phase Understand

Deep Dive: The Syndicate Model

Understanding founding phases

I visualized the founding process of the Mietshäuser Syndikat (MHS) for my own understanding. Using Miro I created a phase model. With the respective abbreviations I marked who is responsible for the respective task - association (MS) or project initiative (HV). Now I had a starting position to be able to recognize potential project ideas in the process.

Stakeholder Mapping

In order to understand the interaction of different actors and to be able to communicate in front of others, I created a stakeholder map: This effect structure helped me to understand the individual roles of the actors.

Phase Understand

User Research

Needs survey

When I was doing research for my bachelors thesis, I already came up with a few possible project ideas. In order to evaluate the relevance of the ideas for the people of the Mietshäuser Syndikat, I created a needs survey, which I had distributed through my contact Robert (IT Department) at the Mietshäuser Syndikat.

The survey initially showed that the narrow majority considered the digital exchange of knowledge to be the most important. However, it turned out that such a digital solution was already being worked on by the IT department at the Mietshäuser Syndikat. In doing so, I realized that the idea of support for admission to the solidary association was rated as exclusively sensible by those surveyed.

I described the idea as follows:

"A digital assistant who supports the volunteer advisors in recurring tasks, thus complementing the in-person counseling and guiding initiatives on the way to inclusion in the syndicate. Initiatives are digitally taken by the hand."

That's why I decided to take on this task.

Personas

In general, I concluded that I have two target groups. The advisors of the MHS and the project initiatives. Based on the identified task, I realized that I had to focus on the consultants. Based on another survey of the consultants, I created personas to get to know the target groups better. In the survey, I anonymously collected demographic information and experience with voluntary consulting work. I would be able to refer back to these throughout the project. I could roughly identify the following two extremes:

Findings

Furthermore, I was able to identify the following needs or pain points from the survey of the consultants:

Individual Consultancy

The consultation differs greatly from project to project in terms of timing and content.

Difficult recording of project course and data

The information on founding groups, their interests, contact details and the course of the consultation are quickly lost in the mailbox and should be easier to record. Clear documentation would therefore be very useful.

Awareness for founding basics

The so-called "handbook" is used by many consultants as a reference work and the members of the project initiatives should also be made aware of it. The content could be made more understandable and accessible for newcomers.

Personal contact and care

Consulting takes place in face-to-face meetings with the groups or occasionally by telephone. Personal contact is very important because the consulting is about trust.

Simultaneous tasks

The tasks involved in founding a house project often run in parallel, since there is often time pressure when purchasing a residential property.

Challenges

Based on the previous user research and the resulting pain points for the consultants, the following challenges in the form of How Might We questions could be derived:

How might we ensure that supervised groups receive basic information, thereby reducing the burden of answering recurring questions?
How might we ensure that the results of the consultation are not lost and can be found again collectively?
How might we achieve that the advisory process is standardized and yet remains individual for the advisors?
How might we ensure that the groups understand the consultation process and can orientate themselves?

Phase Define

UX Conception

Scribbles

During user research, I brought emerging visual solutions to my whiteboard in the form of idea scribbles. These related in particular to the project ideas "advice support" and "knowledge exchange". This type of idea brainstorming paved the way for the UX concept.

Consultation process

The so-called "handbook" and the "advice guidelines" are the central reference works for the advisors.

The handbook provides all the information on founding, financing, administration, etc. The advice guidelines describe the process, the goals and the methods to be used from the first contact through Founding and inclusion in the group of houses up to continuous management in 7 phases.

I brought this content together in a phase model by assigning the content to the phases. I also marked whether it was a task for the consultants or for the project initiatives. This model in turn provided the basis for the content of the interactive application, with the goal of taking house project initiatives by hand.

Functions

The following functions for an interactive application can now be derived from the identified needs and the collected content:

Consultants

Visualize the process of own consultation individually via tasks
Use templates for setting up tasks
Check and confirm the results of the founding groups
Export and share results

Supervised founding group

Inform about founding phases and topics
Comprehend process of consultation
Complete founding tasks and upload results
Export and share results

Wireframes

Based on the previous findings and ideas, increasingly precise wireframes were created in an iterative process. Using the wireframes, I was able to visually explain ideas in meetings with Robert from the MHS and get specialist feedback.

Phase Design Solution

Visual Design

What is SyndiGuide?

Support

The consultants of the Mietshäuser Syndikat can organize and visualize their advisory process on a task-based basis for the group to be looked after.

Information

The supervised group can inform themselves about general topics of founding by being able to view the right information at the right time.

Guidance

Through the visualization, the foundation process can be communicated to the supervised group, who can orientate themselves. By providing sample solutions, the group is able to work on tasks more easily.

Website

The website provides information about the Mietshäuser Syndikat and the SyndiGuide web app. If there is further interest, residential groups will learn what the next steps are. Equally it is the entrance for the web app.

Dashboard

Consultants and residential groups each have their own access to the web app. Using the dashboard, those involved can always keep an eye on the founding process and all the information required for it.

Process

The central element of the web app is a timeline. From this the group can learn what to do next. In advance the consultants can flexibly position tasks on the timeline. In addition the residential group has the option of uploading a background image of their future house and constantly updating it. The more advanced the project is, the clearer the picture becomes.

Export results

It is always possible to compile results in the form of tasks, comments, image and text files across phases. These can be downloaded as a PDF document or shared directly via various channels.

What I've learned

For the first time I was able to conduct the entire User Centered Design Process on my own. As this project was my bachelors thesis, it was quiet important for me to demonstrate my holistic view and skillset to this kind of task.

Diving deep into this topic and finding a need for my thesis was complex, but as the project continued I figured things out. I was able to overcome my inhibitions about finding contacting with experts, who might declined my project ideas, as it was necessary to get closer to the people of the Mietshäuser Syndikat. In reward Robert was a great partner from MHS to take feedback sessions with. He enabled to get to know the people, their needs and concerns. Without his help my user research would not have worked out, as it did.

A huge shout-out to the open-minded people at the Mietshäuser Syndikat and especially Robert from the IT department. Thank you so much for your support!