WCHG

Wythenshawe Community Housing Group supports around 10,000 households across South Manchester. Its website, app and tenant portal had grown hard to use, and residents were falling back on the phone for everything from paying rent to reporting a repair.

Housing services carry real weight. Paying rent, reporting a repair or chasing a tenancy issue can be stressful and time-sensitive, and for many residents the phone was the only route they trusted. That trust was expensive: call volumes were huge, repairs dominated them, and a dated, content-heavy website rarely offered a faster alternative.

The audience made it harder. Residents ranged from young, mobile-first tenants to older, less confident people on ageing devices, carers acting for someone else, and people in financial difficulty checking their balance every week. A redesign had to work for all of them, or it would simply push more people back to the phone.

I led the UX thinking across the programme and stayed hands-on from strategy through to design. In practice that meant:

• Framing the strategy around a single goal: making the digital route the one residents trust
• Planning and facilitating stakeholder workshops to align on structure and priorities
• Designing and leading the research programme, then turning it into a clear direction
• Developing twelve resident and stakeholder personas to keep decisions grounded
• Leading the wireframing and working alongside designers through to a tested, accessible build

The direction drew on a deliberately broad evidence base, combining behavioural data with new, direct research:

• GA4 analytics and call-volume data, to see where demand and frustration concentrated
• A heuristic review of the current website and competitor analysis of other providers
• Focus groups with residents across the full range of confidence and need
• Moderated usability testing of the portal with twelve residents

The research told a consistent story: residents were willing to go digital, but only if it earned their trust at the moments that mattered.

• Repairs drove the most demand and the most difficulty. Residents could not match their problem to the system's categories, and many would abandon the journey and call instead.
• Money tasks needed reassurance, and the hardest of them showed it: setting up a direct debit scored just 2.8 out of 5 for ease. People hesitated when it was not clear what would happen, how much would be taken, or who to contact.
• Navigation behaved unpredictably, with accidental exits and loops that raised anxiety in multi-step journeys.
• Trust was the deciding factor. When confidence dipped, residents fell back on the phone, even after training, and lower-confidence and assisted users struggled most.

I turned the evidence into a clear direction for the website, portal and app:

None of this landed in a single pass. The design grew through continual testing and iteration: wireframes and prototypes taken back to residents and stakeholders, refined on an always-on feedback loop, then tested again, so the hardest journeys earned their shape before launch.

• The direct-debit setup, the task that scored lowest for ease in testing, was reworked through successive rounds until residents could complete it with confidence.
• The visual design was built on a shared component system, so every screen spoke the same language and met the same accessibility bar.
• Each round fed the next, with stakeholder workshops, usability sessions and quick prototype tests catching problems early rather than defending them late.

Built on resident evidence, the programme gave WCHG a new website, a tenant portal and an app: a clearer, more trusted digital experience designed to take pressure off the phone without leaving anyone behind. It went on to win the Digital Transformation award at the Housing Technology Awards.

The result is a joined-up experience, grounded in research: a redesigned website, plus a tenant portal and app for paying rent, setting up direct debits and reporting repairs, built on an accessible, task-led system the whole team can work against.

What I would do next

If continuing, I would prove the impact and keep improving the highest-risk journeys:

• Fix the repair-category and direct-debit issues found in testing, then retest them
• Run post-launch usability testing on the live site and portal against agreed success metrics
• Carry out structured accessibility reviews against recognised standards
• Track call volumes against digital task completion, to measure reduced contact