Interviews With Hidden Homeless Individuals During COVID-19 (March-April 2021)
Project Length: 2 months
Scope: Generative Research, Co-Design, Experimentation, Retrospective
Role and Responsibilities: Project Lead, Research Coaching, Contractor Management, Stakeholder Management, Synthesis and Analysis
Project Overview
Problem
Context
Ample Lab’s mission a social start-up using AI & Data to help cities prevent homelessness. Through our extensive user research we decided to focus on focus on folks facing hidden homelessness as our target user group.
Hidden Homelessness is best defined as people who are not included in office homelessness statistics as they are not using services such as shelters. Instead they rely on sleeping in their cars, couch surfing or the resources they have such as a 24 hour gym membership to bathe or get access to wifi.
It takes an individual facing homelessness anywhere from 4–48 hours to search for services right for them. In North America, 94% of people experiencing homelessness own a mobile phone and 77% own a smartphone.
In March 2020 the Product team at mello wanted to better understand the opportunities and gaps with regard people facing hidden homelessness in Toronto.
We had two assumptions:
- Folks who faced hidden homelessness
- Burnout was also handled by managers, but they did not have as much buying power as HR, but would be secondary users.
Our goal was to user this data get a more complete picture of the journeys target users faced, help our non-product team better understand our users and to help guide our product roadmap to help us determine what new services and features we should add in to the chatbot.
We worked with Anna Kop founder and lead researcher from Blue Umbrella to assist us with this project and its outputs.
Methods
- Semi-structured user interviews
- Persona creation
- Journey mapping
Anna conducted 12 exploratory, 1:1 1 hour paid, semi-structured user interviews with Chalmers users that are facing homelessness.
What Did We Find?
Insights
- The hidden homeless we have encountered through our research have disproportionately been women, people of colour and/or identifying as LGBTQ2 who encounter systematic barriers when accessing resources
- People experiencing periods where they fall in and out of hidden homelessness rather than experiencing it as a singular experience
- They identified an overwhelming sense of shame and stigma prevents people from asking others or connecting with services for help
Impacts from COVID-19
- Unexpected Food costs due to hoarding and supply chain issues
- Limited Assistance from Food banks due to increased demand
- Fear of losing job
- Health risks due to working essential service jobs
- Fear of losing temporary housing arrangements
- Reduced work due to the pandemic effecting service sector jobs leading to reduced income
- Housing Stressors such as roommates not adhering to pandemic protocols
- Inactivity and boredom due to shutdowns, increased Netflix Watching
- Increased cell phone use (talking & data plan) leading to increases costs
- Fear of losing community and connections with other people
Personas
Three Personas were developed from the Interviews as a means to accurately capture and humanize the needs and experiences with daily life and the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic.
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Journey Mapping the Employee Experience
Each persona had a corresponding journey map that was created to document individuals housing and support journey.
What did we do next?
We launched a survey to further understand the impact Covid-19 on our user population.
Food insecurity was cited as a main concern for participants during the study and later though our conversations service providers.
Ample switched away from new feature development in order to focus on improving access to Food resources. Our user research activities prepared us prepared us for the changes to come: Food Bank inquiries on Chalmers between March 2020 to May 2020 increased by 1400% to over 10,400 requests.
As an effort to support our service partners we published the results of our research.