Building user-centered design capability and digitising the £7B Affordable Housing Fund

From 2020 to 2021, I was part of a rapidly growing, 70+ person multi-disciplinary transformation team delivering an ambitious, four-year, £146 million modernization programme for Homes England. The agency’s goals were to reduce reliance on legacy tech, improve service efficiency, and build mature digital capabilities without increasing headcount.

As a Service Design Lead, my responsibilities evolved to match the agency's shifting needs, ultimately focusing where user-centered design (UCD) could drive the highest impact. My role included:

• Leading user-centered design for the Investment Directorate.
• Providing service design expertise directly within delivery teams.
• Co-leading the development of the agency-wide UCD Community of Practice.
• Building internal design assurance processes.

Prior to this programme, the agency had zero internal design or research capability and was digitally immature regarding UCD and agile service development. There was an absolute lack of structure, principles, or support for user-centered ways of working.

Compounding this, the work had to be done entirely remotely, as most of the team — including myself — joined during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building a cohesive culture and establishing brand-new practices from scratch in a siloed, remote public sector environment presented a massive organisational hurdle.

As part of the UCD leadership team, I successfully established and scaled the agency’s first design and research Communities of Practice. To overcome the remote delivery challenges, we negotiated 20% dedicated capacity from senior leadership early on, giving the team the space to co-create necessary processes, tools, and relationships.

Through these communities, we:

• Established the agency’s foundational design and research principles.
• Implemented regular fortnightly meetups and monthly peer feedback sessions to maintain design quality and assurance.

This online application was a critical piece of Homes England’s newly launched £7 billion Affordable Housing Programme, designed to enable certified housing associations and developers to apply for grants to build affordable homes.

As the Service Design Lead, I guided the delivery team through the entire product lifecycle, from initial discovery through to the successful launch. My role involved:

• Scoping project requirements and framing the core problem space.
• Leading end-to-end user research, analysis, and synthesis.
• Facilitating collaborative service mapping workshops with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Developing and iterating service prototypes to test with partners.

Prior to this digital service, strategic partner funding was managed entirely manually through spreadsheets and Word documents. This legacy process was heavily time-consuming, highly susceptible to error due to version control issues, and required massive operational overhead. Because the administration was so burdensome, agency staff were left with very little time to thoroughly evaluate the funding submissions, meaning the critical assessment phase was historically rushed.

We successfully designed, built, and launched the digital application. The new service dramatically reduced the administrative burden on agency staff by embedding clear, accessible funding guidance directly into a structured digital application form, which eliminated manual version-control errors.

By automating and streamlining the intake process, we successfully shifted the organizational focus: the internal team was able to pivot away from manual troubleshooting and instead dedicate their time to high-value assessment and evaluation of fund applications.