The City and County of San Francisco, led by Mayor London Breed, works to provide all who call San Francisco home with a safe, vibrant, inclusive city. The ever-growing population of nearly 900,000 residents, however, have long felt the effects of the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis. The Housing Division of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) believes in a San Francisco where people can find affordable housing with ease and transparency.

The Housing Portal is designed to serve a diverse population with an accessible set of tools to use throughout the process of finding and applying for affordable housing. Exygy started by conducting user research with several demographics including low and middle income households, seniors, veterans, disabled users, users living with HIV/AIDS, and users with housing vouchers. Our research identified key pain points in these users’ journey. Our design and product team crafted a roadmap with a set of features in the backlog to address these pain points in priority order. The housing applicant served as the main user group while housing counselors, MOHCD staff members, and leasing agents served as the broader user groups.

Our agile approach allowed us to go from design to development and initial alpha release of the product in four months. We’ve since continued to release features iteratively. The web application for the DAHLIA Housing Portal has been built using a stack of Ruby on Rails and Angular.