Together for Choice
Helping families of individuals with developmental and mental disabilites find safe living arrangements
The challenge
Parents and caregivers of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) face significant challenges in finding reliable and accessible information about housing and resources. The lack of clear, accessible, and centralized information leads to frustration, delays, and missed opportunities for securing appropriate housing and support services. Lengthy waitlists for housing facilities, often extending up to a decade, further compound the problem, leaving families feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about their loved ones' futures.
Who is Together for Choice?
TFC help the special needs communities on a National Level, which is referred to as Individuals with Developmental and Mental Disabilities (I/DD). They provide educational resources through Webinars, consult organizations and individuals on federal policies, advocating and work to expand housing options. Their mission is to Protect and Advance the rights of individuals with (I/DD) to live, work and thrive in a community or setting of their choice; helping 25,000+ individuals, and work with 130+ organizations in the US.
Our Goals
Our goal was to create an engaging and intuitive platform to strengthen the advocacy effort and provide educational resources for the I/DD community. We want to position Together for Choice as the go-to place for learning resources on housing, services, regulations, and policies related to I/DD. Secondly, we want to strengthen the user base by converting users to members and empower users to make informed decisions with the array of housing choices.
Research
Getting to know our users
As we navigate the sensitive space of the I/DD community it was extremely important to learn as much as we could about the organization's mission, what they do and our users.
While there are multiple groups of users – Organizations that consist of service providers, advocacy organizations, emerging housing groups, consulting firms, and trade organizations.
We will only focus on one due to the limited resources with TFC being a non-profit and project timeframe.
Individuals with special needs, their families, and allies.
Quantitative and qualitative data
We took advantage of the analytics report on Wix Since they already had an existing website – we wanted to see how users were interacting with the site and acquired the current accessibility score to work on improving it by designing with the WCAG guideline.
After, we began to seek out qualitative data to pair with the quantitative data. Ashley and the whole community was eager to help as she sent out the mass email with the survey so we can get real users, existing and new, to participate in our usability test and user interview.
Difficulty finding the information or help she needs to complete her goals.
Users should know exactly what it is before clicking into it and they shouldn't have to guess.
Broken links and lack of clarity within the content.
We began to ask ourselves
How might we redesign Together for Choice to deliver Dakota a seamless, clear, and dependable platform to safe housing and supportive community?
Design
We began the design process by building a story with our primary user to showcase the full user's interactions. This helped us create a compelling visual of the user's perspective and the story will align our team and keep us on track if we lose sight of our goals. Additionally, it helps us create our user's task flows in the next step.
Here is the story of Dakota and how want her experience to unfold.
- Dakota has a son with severe autism. She feels overwhelmed and currently doesn't have the right support.
- Dakota has a son with severe autism. She feels overwhelmed and currently doesn't have the right support.
- She discovers Together for Choice website. She wants to engage and learn MORE about all things I/DD.
- Dakota signed up for an upcoming webinar and look for a local community located in the "Explore Membership" page.
- She sees all of the members and organizations to connect with for support so she signed up for an individual membership.
- She search through the homes available for her sons and was impressed by the array of options.
- She Feels empowered by the community and the resources that Together for Choice provides. Now she is more at ease.
Obstacles
There were a few obstacles and technical constraints that we need to keep in mind – as I mentioned that this is a Non-Profit with limited resources and we don't have a software engineer to build out our designs. I knew my way around Webflow so I took on the challenge of building it.
However, our client also had many ideas like paid membership page, forums, gated content but with this being a huge undertaking on a strict timeline and we are working with tight constraints – we helped our decision maker manage the project expectations by prioritizing features that focus on solutions for the primary problems found in our research.
We collaborated in Figjam to create 3 task flows to ensure we have all the steps planned out so our primary user can complete their goals
Delivery
Solution 1 Introducing the new TFC's landing page with enhanced information hierarchy
Additionally, with the help from the National Coordinator, Ashley, we narrowed down the primary brand color that played a vital role in improving the visual consistency and making sure its on brand. Blue for actions and pink to communicate a nurturing and gentle vibe.
Most importantly, we improved the navigation bar with clear call to action buttons with proper use of colors and dropdown menu indicator like the arrow icon.
Solution 2 Implemented Miller's Law: Chunking
Another reason why Webinars needed its own page is because the organization has a goal to become a leader for hosting Webinars. Its their main sources of educational content and they want to do it more frequently.
Solution 3 Reduced Cognitive load
When the information presented is cluttered and there's too much going on in one card, like having to guess on the setting type, or endless scrolling on the member's list – users struggle mentally to keep up and tasks become more difficult.
Building trust with consistent interactions with all working links in housing cards and clear seperatino of "Setting types."
Efficiently search for Available housing with clear status of home in developement or in operation.
Solution 3.1 Supporting organization objectives and user needs.
Crowdsourcing is primary source of TFC's housing options – User submit a Google form, we'll verify it and post it in our housing directory if it all checks out. In the previous design, the "Submit a listing" function was hidden at the bottom of the housing directory page.
When you filter by State, it doesn't show all of the members in one page and when you click next, it would reload the whole page so users couldn't connect with the member within their state. However, they were still able to sign up for a membership.
We want to make sure that our product can be used by real users. I worked on feedback from our decision maker, and users to address issues to deliver feasible solutions that addressed both our usability and business problems.
Adapting to the messiness of the design process
During any design process, there will be unexpected challenges like usability problems, deadline being pushed up or technical limitations that we need to make iterations based on feedback or performance and possibly change and adapt our approach.
Collaboration
Our team were open minded and growth driven individuals, we all learned how to accept and give feedback while knowing how to communicate our design decisions.
These mindsets and the harmonious team dynamic was a huge factor in how we were able to create a platform to help families of I/DD find safe living arrangements.
I believe that the quality of your work is only as good as your ability to work with other. Overall this was a wholesome project and fulfilling to be apart of helping TFC carry out their mission.
Impact
Improved in Accessibility Score
Completion rate
Most recent solution March 20, 2025 Improved how our primary users can connect with organization members
“I was impressed with the team’s acute assessment of users’ needs based on their detailed research, analysis and empathy. I was also impressed with their aptitude for high-quality and accessible design for all types of users. They went above and beyond our expectations in all aspects of the design, delivery and implementation."
