Manufactured Housing Product Evaluation

challenge & outcomes

We sought to understand the barriers and identify opportunities for a new manufactured housing (MH) product that our partners recently launched.

During this 3-month evaluative research and synthesis project, we created a report that informed the strategy for the product moving forward.

my role

I joined the project after most of the research was complete and played a key role in the synthesis process. I framed the story that we would tell our partners. I also owned the written content for the final report as well as voice/tone and visual design for the presentation deck.

Molly Reddy led the project and conducted the research with Seul Rhee, and I synthesized the data in collaboration with Molly and Seul. Vy Vu designed the final report.

research

Since this product was newly launched at the time of this project, there were only a limited number of transactions. The team conducted 20 phone interviews with 23 individuals who were either directly or indirectly involved with successful transactions with the new product. (I was not involved with the interviews for this project.)

synthesis

This was a new type of research project for our design team. We were accustomed to working with qualitative research at a discovery phase, rather than this evaluative lens that we took for this project. The team was struggling with finding a way to frame the interview data, as our usual visualization and discovery insights framework didn't fit some of the more tactical learnings that revealed barriers the product was coming up against.

I brought my science background and communication design lens to frame the final share-out and report with original hypotheses, validations, and discoveries. We explicitly framed our partners' original hypotheses as their best assumptions given the information they had at the beginning of their process. We also called out the information we uncovered that validated their hypotheses before jumping into our discoveries that revealed those barriers.

Finally, we created nine recommendations for short-term, mid-term, and blue-sky futures based on opportunities we uncovered in our research.

impact

With the barriers, opportunities, and recommendations from our research, our partners have had more informed conversations about their product strategy with their stakeholders and are building out a new approach to bringing the product to market.