A home-buying system that lets clients move through the entire bidding process independently, online.
One House At A Time is a government-adjacent nonprofit revitalizing Baltimore neighborhoods by restoring vacant properties. Clients bid on properties, renovate, and sell, creating a system for rebuilding the city.
The site could not carry clients through the process. Initial steps, important dates, and follow-through were unclear, and applications lived on paper, so few visitors became completers of the end-to-end flow.
How might we help clients feel confident moving through the bidding process on their own?
Every move below is an answer to that question.
Audiences struggled to find property details and called the office to ask staff about locations. I built faceted search with new property detail pages: a one-page snapshot of every location at auction, past and present.
The bidding process confused people from start to finish. I rebuilt the architecture around process and success, added a section for important dates, and put the One House steps on the homepage, so clients always know what comes next and when.
Stakeholders and clients wanted a curated experience. I created a login flow with a fully online bidding application, a zip-code selector for properties in chosen areas, and a dashboard with alerts for upcoming dates, auctions, and events.
The redesign gave One House a platform clients can use on their own. Property information lives in one searchable place, the bidding process is legible from start to finish, and the application that used to travel by mail is completed online.
I built the prototype and ran usability testing for this project. Both are internal and can’t be accessed at this time.