Charles Madden envisioned a creative career until a Scout project working with the city of Boston on a site to help homebuyers helped him discover human-based design.
Buying a home is complicated, especially in Boston where housing stock is pricey and scarce. So when the city government wanted to create a website that streamlined the process and resources available for buyers, they turned to Scout, Northeastern’s student-led design studio, for help.
Experience design major Charles Madden was one of the students who helped develop two new web pages for the city that address all the questions buyers might have during the house-hunting process.
The months spent working with homebuyers to learn about their needs and using that intel to create a comprehensive and concise digital product did more than just help the city. It inspired Madden to consider a career in civic technology.
“It’s definitely difficult to grasp a subject as large as (home buying), but that’s the beauty of the human-centered design process,” he says. “It allows you to attack problems that you’ve never been exposed to, and gain a holistic understanding of them. That’s what we were doing that first semester. I was interviewing, surveying and just empathizing with people.
“The biggest thing that they preach throughout the process … is building empathy with users and people’s experiences. That process allows you to kind of approach any large topic and find a niche that you can help.”
Like many others across the country, the Boston housing market is very competitive, with listings being sold usually in under a month and the median sales price being $845,000. The home-buying process is even more challenging for first-time buyers new to the market.
The city partnered with the community engagement-oriented branch of Scout to come up with resources to simplify the process for first-time buyers. Madden, along with a team of other students, worked with the Boston Home Center and the mayor’s Office of Housing Innovation for a year to build a comprehensive website and guide for first-time buyers.
“Navigating the home-buying process can be overwhelming, and Boston’s high-cost market presents additional hurdles to many households,” said Paige Roosa, director of the city’s Housing Innovation Lab. “We appreciate Charlie and the Scout team for bringing their collective curiosity, creativity and perseverance in building a new tool to support Bostonians with achieving homeownership.”
The first half of the project involved research into the home-buying process, what the target audience needed to know about it, and what kind of design would best meet their needs. Madden said a small team spent a semester working with different stakeholders to determine what a typical home-buying process looks like for people and when they would need certain resources.
Together, the team interviewed experts from the Boston Home Center and other home-buying nonprofits, along with nine home buyers. They also surveyed people who took a home buying 101 class.
What the team found was that many people would take the introductory class and then leave unsure of the next steps. With this in mind, Madden said the team created a prototype website with step-by-step guide and resources.
“The biggest thing we realized was that people are just completely unaware that there’s so much infrastructure available to them, especially if they’re new to the city, don’t have a high income, or they’re new to America,” Madden said. “There’s a lot of resources available, but it’s completely unknown to most homebuyers. That became our main mission, understanding what are the pain points along the process of home buying and how we can intervene within those pain points and provide some clarity and consolidation of information, because everything felt very elusive from what we learned.”
The following semester, a larger team got together to refine that prototype and create a design to make it easy to use using human-centered design, a practice that focuses on connecting with the people being impacted by a problem and creating a product to meet their needs.
The final product was two pages for the city of Boston’s website: one that outlines the process of home buying from start to finish and the other with resources available to buyers from both the government and nonprofits. The website can be translated into different languages and also comes as a PDF that can be printed since the team found many buyers faced language and technology-related barriers.
At the time this was happening, Madden began pursuing professional opportunities in civic technology. Eventually, he landed a co-op for the IRS building and designing an internal website for employees working to modernize data processing systems.
Rather than designing logos and graphics for brands, Madden now envisions a future in the public sector, creating digital products that present information in a clear and concise way.
“That’s what really got me into civic technology and designing for positive social impact,” Madden said. “What inspired me was that I created something that I knew was going to help people. It seems very simple, but that was a big thing for me. … I feel like a lot of students have a really similar ethos where they want their work to matter. But the entirety of the public sector is kind of looked down upon. And I think that’s wrong. There’s so much great work going on, and it might not always be the most exciting day to day, but it is undeniably going to help millions of people, and that means a lot to me.”