Your Landowner Roadmap
Initial Concept Brainstorm
Initial Concept Design by Jasmine Stammes
Overview: The Checklist will aim to address the difficulty landowners, particularly heirs landowners, have with finding clear and actionable steps for land management. Upon answering some baseline questions, landowners would receive a progress score. Based on the progress score landowners would be recommended a set of clear and key action steps. Action steps can include everything from obtaining a will to updating property taxes.
Target Audience: Landowners (Heirs Champions)
New iteration of The Checklist — The Roadmap by Brandon Dorn. Emphasis on a list of supportive tasks based on 5 intended land goals; Maintaining and cultivating the land, Earning Passive Income, Designate as Historic Preservation, Create a Conservation Easement and Share with Future Generations.
Visual Design by Katie Frohbose
The Project
Led research in a three-phase project aimed at designing a digital product for the Resourceful Communities’ Heirs property initiative. We conducted discovery research in phase one to inform the design and development of the product.
The purpose of this research was to develop a better understanding of Black landowners facing challenges due to their heirs property designation as well as other land retention challenges.
The Team
Phase one: Jasmine Stammes (Lead UX Researcher), Chris Daley (UX Researcher)
The Process
Reviewed existing materials and peer resources.
Conducted landscape summary of potential peer resources.
Conducted moderated interviews with intermediary groups supporting Black landowners and Black landowners in the rural south.
Identified and defined key goals and priorities for Heirs Property initiative digital platform
Responsibilities
Designed, moderated, and analyzed stakeholder and user interviews.
Generated digital strategy and recommendations for Heirs Property.
Developed initial concepts based on research recommendations.
The Findings
Phase One [Moderated Interviews]
Our understandings of land are driven by narratives of ownership. History has taught Americans to value individual ownership, which often cast narratives around shared ownership models – including heir’s property – in a negative light.
There are conflicting narratives around land that juxtapose land as a space of wealth and legacy versus land as a space of trauma and burden.
Heirs property has historically been seen as an obstacle to be overcome (not just by families, but also by intermediaries and the government). This has knock on effects for how people deal with (and are made to deal with) heirs’ property.
Heirs property, like all property relations, is an intersectional issue that disproportionately affects marginalized groups and reinforces their marginal positions.
Heirs property must be thought of as a generational issue. Older generations deal with the land, but younger generations are better suited to engaging a digital platform.
Heirs property is a widespread reality yet is poorly understood. A lack of data and resources contribute to this problem.
The technical aspects of dealing with land management are hard. The lack of clear paths to resources can make the task next to impossible.
The barriers to collaboration between intermediaries on the ground are reproduced in the digital space.
Takeaways
Investigate the use of more participatory research techniques.
Involve multiple stakeholders in brainstorming workshops.
Directly recruit stakeholders with clear information on expectations.
Discuss potential internal politics that might cause barrier to execution.
Involve stakeholders with intimate knowledge of problem space.