Vicky Houghton-Price

Homes for Ukraine

I led the design of a rapid-response government service for Ukrainian refugees to find safe host families in the UK to live with. Over 115,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the UK under this scheme. This case study looks at improvements we made to our re-matching service, when the first host relationship breaks down.

The service did two things

  1. Ensured the first match was safe, by translating visa applications into new cases for local authorities, where they would manage the safeguarding of both hosts and guests.
  2. Found new hosts when the first hosting relationship broke down.
A service map where guests and hosts match, move in together and the government service that supports these actions by ensuring the match is safe and supporting them after they arrive if things go wrong.
This service map shows the core user journey through the middle and the key services my department (DLUHC) delivered in blue.

Finding new hosts was proving paticularly challenging

The second part of the service, where the arrivals were found a new host, proved most difficult. In the rare, but important cases where guests were forced out of their hosts home and presented as homeless, local authorities were struggling to find replacement homes at speed.

a news article screenshot reporting ukranian refugees becoming homeless after falling out with their hosts.
As this news article shows, there were some host relationships that didn't work out, and finding the guests a new home was crucial.

Through research, we found a bottleneck in our rematching service

We did a round of remote interviews with potential hosts and Local Authority caseworkers, alongside quantitative analysis of existing data we had on prospective hosts.

Local authorities told us the list they are working from was low quality.

A service map specificaly on our rematching service. The bottleneck is when caseworkers tried to find an appropriate host and it took ages to find one, if at all, from the hosts available.
A map of our rematching process, where the bottleneck was trying to find a suitable host.

Not all hosts were ready to take on a guest

We identified 3 mindsets in our prospective hosts:

  1. Hands on hosts: who are already hosting through their own means, and aren’t available to host more.
  2. Hosts on hold: who were interested, and had filled in a registration form, but were waiting to be contacted.
  3. Hopeful hosts: registered their interest with optimism, but in reality wouldn’t feel up for it if the opportunity arose.

We worked on making local authority lists easier to filter by geography and qualities. But we also set out to improve the registration flow so that it led to a higher quality list in the first place.

3 mindsets that we shared with wider stakeholders to help them understand our users
We developed these mindsets in a way that we could communicate with wider policy teams, a bit like personas, but with mindsets, the idea is we can change them.

How might we improve host readiness at the point of registration?

We worked to improve our registration flow to increase the quality of hosts available by adding

  1. Upfront guidance and case studies to help people prepare for hosting.
  2. Reflective questions to invite users to consider if their home and lifestyle was compatible with hosting.
  3. Clearer next steps so users knew what would happen next and when they needed to be proactive.
digital sketches of the host registration journey from seeing an advert to completing the registration form
Digital sketches and low fidelity prototypes of our ideas to improve the registration flow. Low fidelity prototypes were an effective was of sharing ideas with stakeholders who were less open to designs when they looked too real (and scary).

Upfront guidance tested poorly, but our reflective questions worked well

Some users found the case studies hard to apply to their current lives. But most users failed to read any of the content at all and went straight to the form.

Our reflective questions worked well: Users paused, thought and made better descriptions.

"On second thoughts, I think I'd need to talk this through with my husband a bit more"

We took these findings and refined our ideas, tested them a bit more, until we were ready to release the new changes. There were a lot of cooks and interest in this project, from a local, voluntary, comms and policy perspective, so it required a lot of stakeholder management to get everything signed off in the end.

The updated registration form on mobile across three screens.
The updated registration form on desktop, asking users to reflect on important things to consider before hosting.
We asked questions to create friction for the hosts and encourage them to think through the onligation a bit more before registering.

Impact on our rematching service

We reduced the number of people on the list of potential hosts that weren’t prepared for the responsibility. This meant that caseworkers reported it was easier to find hosts from their list.

We had also adapted the questions, removing unnecessary data, and adjusting questions so caseworkers found the data easier to filter.

The wider project

Finding guests new hosts was just one part of the wider service of which I led design and strategy for a wide range of projects to build, expand and improve the service.

In 9 months we developed a core service for notifying local authorities of arriving refugees, safeguarding hosts and guests, and providing routes to rematching when relationships broke down. Over 115,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the UK under this scheme.

The scheme has since been repurposed to find homes for other refugees currently stuck in costly and uncomfortable hotels.

We won “Delivery of the Year” at Made Tech, and I designed our initial rapid response team stickers to honour the intensely hard work that went into those first 6 months.

A sticker celebrating the work of the Homes for Ukraine rapid response digital team in 2022. It is in Ukraine's national colours with a sunflower, the national flower, at the center