Neighborhood Finance

A map for loan-program staff. Search an address, see the zone, understand the color without a legend scavenger hunt.

Neighborhood Finance Corporation answers a spatial question all day: does this household fall inside a program boundary in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids? I led the four-person team that replaced a manual check with a map their own staff can update.

Problem

Paper and institutional knowledge do not scale, and the people who know the zones will not learn a GIS suite. The interface had to be obvious to a loan officer and editable by a colleague who is comfortable in a browser, not in a codebase.

Process

I separated the reader’s task from the editor’s task. The reader gets a map, a city switch, a search box, and polygons whose color is the program. The editor gets a written path: draw the shape, name it the way the manifest expects, set a color, commit. Holes, renames, and reverts are their own short guides because those are the moments people panic and stop.

Solution

• One map, two cities, search pinned to the address. The polygon is the answer.
• Color and label come from one manifest, so the legend cannot drift from the shapes.
• A second mode for a program variant, switched without a second website.
• Editing documentation written in the order a non-technical person actually gets stuck.

Results

• $100K+ A year in staff time, on the client’s side
• 2 Cities, one interface
• 4 Person team
• 1 Manifest. The map does not hardcode a neighborhood

Justin Moran · UI/UX Designer · Chicago, IL · LinkedIn · Resume (PDF)