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🚨 DISCLAIMER
While I led design from day 1, the current site shows a different visual style building on architecture I defined.

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01 Introduction

Context

Purchasing a home in Canada is unaffordable for the everyday person.

When condos and single family homes have become unaffordable options, more cities have been turning to middle housing as a cost-effective way to increase their housing supply.

According to the Urban Land Institute, adding just one unit to 15% of houses in Toronto would be equivalent to adding 100 condo towers.

And within middle housing, gentle density projects like:

• adding another unit to a house –> aka Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)
• or converting a house into a multi-unit building --> aka Multiplex

are the fastest, least-disruptive, and most cost-effective approach to increasing affordable housing. More people can move into areas with existing roads, transit systems, and schools.

Many Canadian cities and federal governments support gentle density! But when homeowners and small-scale developers actually pursue building a Multiplex or adding an ADU to their property, they face a lot of difficulty finding financial products to support these projects.

We aimed to make it easier for everyday people to access middle housing. And from the start, every conversation we had with experts and specialist came back to the same problem — financing.

Problem

The fragmented financing landscape is difficult for homeowners to navigate ADU funding options alone.

There's dozens of guides and tools out there about middle housing in Canada, but "one thing, no matter how many resources you provide, how many tools we create, people are still getting stuck at financing" (Darlene Jehn from MDDL). Most of these guides were city specific and had little to no financing content.

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02 Research & Discovery

Research

Getting creative with our research strategy

We dove deep into the ADU building process, hunting down users in relevant spaces and interviewing the experts they rely on for help.

The strategy was pretty *investigative*, I reached out far and wide– visited trade shows, unearthed writer of faceless middle housing blogs, found laneway home community meetups and whatever it took to find the right people.

Identifying Critical Pain Points

As I talked with more experts, homeowners and developers, common threads emerged—

#1 — Heavy reliance on online forums & social media to navigate the process

“Most of what I know came from anecdotal conversations, ‘I heard this person is doing this’ rather than official resources.”
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– Interviewee

📝 INSIGHT
Online communities offer recommendations, financing tips, and real-world insights, BUT can skew people's expectations, don't systematize information or provide complete details.

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#2 — Frustration with Banks

“It was hard to find anyone in banks or credit unions who understood ADU financing. Not everyone is trained on these.”  

– Interviewee

📝 INSIGHT
Many participants did not have the time, knowledge or guidance to find all the potential financing options available to them OR the right financing experts to ask for help.

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#3 — Difficulty navigating Permits, Regulations & Zoning alone

"I rely on my developer to track different timelines and regulations—without them, I’d be lost.”
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– Interviewee

📝 INSIGHT
People wished they had a knowledgeable team (e.g., developers, contractors, or financial advisors) to make the process easier and a tool that combined financing, regulations, and case studies.

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#4 — Motivations for Development

“Rental income was my main motivation. I wouldn’t have bought the property otherwise.”
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– Interviewee

📝 INSIGHT
People were primarily motivated to build an ADU or Multiplex by multigenerational living or the potential to create rental Income and investment income.

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03 Design Process

Defining the Content Structure

Based off our research and timeline we drafted rough ideas we could realistically build to solve the problems we identified, and boiled them down into 5 core experiences.

I translated these core experiences into a clear site structure —

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Design

Wireframes

I started with wireframes to give my team something to critique, but we made several iterations as we learnt more from our user interviews with homeowners and developers.

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Let's dive into the strategy and rationale behind these design decisions.

Scannable Information Hierarchy

In the interviews, I noticed many novice homeowners and developers felt overwhelmed by the numerous steps involved in building an ADU, to the extent that some were giving up early in the process.

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‍Clarifying finance options

The struggle to find finance options was a common frustration. The language used was often opaque, and when interviewees heard about finance products word of mouth it was often unclear which experts to go to.

So we organized our database of financing options into these 4 categories to help people navigate the chaos:

• ADU and Multiplex Specific Products
• Government Assistance
• Traditional Financing Options
• Alternative Options

I tailored the design to the volume of results for each category and the specific details users needed to evaluate their choices.

Card Iterations

In some cases, there was a high volume of financing results for users to browse through. I took some time to experiment with the card design to achieve quick readability.

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04 Learnings

Staying open-minded

I learned not to hold too strongly to my initial idea of the solution here. The more  data I collected, the more my original design hypothesis needed changing. Pivoting into building something more relevant is always a better use of time than sticking to the original idea out of convenience.

Getting people to open up

Be it usability testing or plain old interviews, I noticed people tend to engage more meaningfully if they are convinced what you are designing will benefit them. People need convincing to open up. And often being the one-woman designer and researcher, I've learned that my conviction is a powerful tool in this scenario.

Besides compensation, offering early access or even access to your research conclusions can help establish common trust with test users, and give them strong reasons to share their story.