Nobody is designing for these people.

Where this comes from

In 2005, in a planning meeting at a small healthcare software company, everyone was drawing database architecture on a whiteboard. I couldn't focus on it. I kept asking a different set of questions — who is going to use this, why, and what does the report we're building actually look like to a pharmacist at 7am before rounds? My boss handed me a copy of Alan Cooper's About Face. It turned out there was an entire discipline built around the questions I'd been interrupting meetings to ask.

Two years later we shipped a clinical decision support tool designed around those users. It went on to serve more than 300 hospitals and earn the highest rating in its category. I've spent the twenty years since chasing that same feeling, and building design organizations from scratch four times over.

Somewhere in the middle of that I spent five years doing field research with Medicaid patients — clinics, community health centers, benefit enrollment offices. People navigating a system built to process them rather than serve them. We never shipped the product I wanted to ship. But I came away with a clear picture of what it looks like to design for someone who has learned not to expect much from the systems they're required to use.

What we believe

The safety net is not primarily underfunded. It is structurally broken. Every program runs its own forms, its own eligibility engine, and its own renewal clock, and the burden of holding all of it together falls on the person with the least capacity to carry it. Billions of dollars in benefits go unclaimed every year mostly because the process is too hard to navigate.

That is a design problem before it is a policy problem. It is certainly a design problem before it is a software problem.

How we're building

Applicant first. The compliance tooling for property managers is real, it's where the first revenue comes from, and it exists as a consequence of fixing the applicant experience — not as the point of the company.

Hardest market first. We're starting in Oregon because it is the most demanding compliance environment we could pick, which makes every state after it easier rather than harder.

In public, including the parts that aren't flattering. The research and reasoning behind this company get published as we go — the decisions, the reframes, and the assumptions that didn't survive contact with reality.

Where we are

Early. The market research is done and the thesis is written. The customer interviews that turn it into evidence are what happens next. If you have applied for affordable housing, run compliance for a portfolio, or administer benefits at an agency, we would like to talk to you — read the thesis or get in touch.