United States Agency for International Development

Role: 

UX Researcher and Designer

Team: 

Harvard Tech for Social Good

Length: 

6 Month Contract

Case Study Read Time: 

5 minutes

Key Contributions:

UX Design
UX Research
UI Design
United States Forest Service
United Nations Capital Development Fund

Developing Tools to
Address Discrimination
in Schools

01. Overview

As a Product Designer at Discriminology, I collaborated with a small team through Harvard's Tech for Social Good initiative to bring clarity to school discipline data. I contributed to the UX, UI, and product strategy for an early-stage MVP, helping turn abstract ideas into a prototype that was pitched to funders, school districts, and community stakeholders.

This project was my first time making product strategy decisions, alongside design. This role pushed me to think beyond just visuals and UX, but also about branding, market positioning, and business goals as a whole.  I was trusted to take initiative on core features, competitor analysis, and early strategic direction, all while balancing user needs with startup constraints.

Strategy
Ideate
Design

02. The Role

03. The Goal

The project aimed to develop a platform that highlights racial inequality in schools around the United States by compiling quantitative data from the U.S. Department of Education. However, as we fig deeper, we found that numbers weren't enough. The organizers we were working with preferred stories.
‍
That insight led us to focus our efforts on solving the following core problem statement:

How can we design an accessible, user-friendly reporting tool that provides narrative context alongisde quantative data in a way that is useful for community organizers?

04. Adapting Our Approach

Challenge

Early in the UX process, I was told by the Product Lead and CEO that I would not be able to conduct interviews or gather firsthand stakeholder research due to timing constraints. Instead, I was given pre-recorded focus groups that had been conducted before I joined the project.

Solution

This challenged me to move beyond my familiar, step-by-step UX processes that I followed in the past. WIthout the ability to conuduct my own research, I had to rethink the role data played in my UX process. I reimagined and adapted my design values and found new ways to let insights guide design decisions.

The New Process

Research Review
Since we weren't able to conduct our own inital research, I worked with pre-recorded focus groups from earlier stakeholder conversations.
I combed through transcripts and video recordings, puling out key themes and quotes. I studied the process that community advocated took to collect and use data in their work. And from there, I built out an affinity map to capture patters in challenges, goals, and mental models.
Click above to enlarge!
Inspiration Scan
Without access to the traditional user research that I was used to, I had to shift how I thought about insight. I turned to source inspiration reference and analyzed tools that had features I was inspired by to understand how others were communicating stories with both data and narrative.
I looked closely at how these tools balanced usability with meaning and guided users through complexity. These references served as a stand-in for direct feedback, helping me define features that felt both strategic and empathetic.
Click above to enlarge!

“We were essentially the Instagram police and called out fake influencers left, right and centre. It was fun and all, but there is only so many bikini chicks you can look at on Instagram before you start losing your mind.”

Dan, Co-founder and CEO of Lumio

Strategic Foundations
With a clearer sense of user needs, values, and inspiration, I worked alongside the CEO and Product Manager to traslate these ideas into product direction. We aligned key audiences, scoped potential feature sets, and prioritized goals based on what the data and context allowed.
Click above to enlarge!

“After this, we both took up golf during the week and started eating fancy dinners at the local Country Club... Ha. This is not what happened at all. We suck at golf and love eating Guzman Y Gomez.”

Adam, Co-founder of Lumio

05. Process

Research Review
Since we weren't able to conduct our own inital research, I worked with pre-recorded focus groups from earlier stakeholder conversations.
I combed through transcripts and video recordings, puling out key themes and quotes. I studied the process that community advocated took to collect and use data in their work. And from there, I built out an affinity map to capture patters in challenges, goals, and mental models.
Inspiration Scan
Without access to the traditional user research that I was used to, I had to shift how I thought about insight. I turned to source inspiration reference and analyzed tools that had features I was inspired by to understand how others were communicating stories with both data and narrative.
I looked closely at how these tools balanced usability with meaning and guided users through complexity. These references served as a stand-in for direct feedback, helping me define features that felt both strategic and empathetic.

“We were essentially the Instagram police and called out fake influencers left, right and centre. It was fun and all, but there is only so many bikini chicks you can look at on Instagram before you start losing your mind.”

Dan, Co-founder and CEO of Lumio

Strategic Foundations
With a clearer sense of user needs, values, and inspiration, I worked alongside the CEO and Product Manager to traslate these ideas into product direction. We aligned key audiences, scoped potential feature sets, and prioritized goals based on what the data and context allowed.
Read about the acquisition

“After this, we both took up golf during the week and started eating fancy dinners at the local Country Club... Ha. This is not what happened at all. We suck at golf and love eating Guzman Y Gomez.”

Adam, Co-founder of Lumio

Testing Core Concepts
With strategic goals and user insights in mind, I kicked off the first design sprint focused on testing how community organizers might interact with narrative and data side-by-side.
I started by mapping the critical user flow: how someone would arrive on the platform, engage with a report, and walk away with something they could use in their advocacy? This process became the core lens I used to wireframe early layouts.
Throughout the sprint, I returned to the stakeholder recordings to ground my decisions in what real organizers had said. I shared these concepts with my team, refined based on feedback, and made sure each idea was rooted in user experience.

Whilst in Germany, Dan worked with with brands such as Daniel Wellington and BMW - Ja!

Adam worked with clients like Vodafone, TAFE NSW, Adobe and also won the 'Good Design Australia' award for his work on the Seatfrog website.

Read about the Good Design Award
Final Presentation to Stakeholders
🚀 relume launches
For various reasons, Dan and Adam decide to turn down a $100,000 investment from Antler and start their own business venture, without taking outside investment.

To do this they would have to build a company that would be profitable in its first year. Not the next Uber of *insert clever idea*.

06.
The Final Product

Here's a look at what we delivered to Discriminology's leadership team, based on the insights we uncovered and strategic foundations we laid.

Home Screen

We wanted the home screen to do a lot, but feel like a little. It needed to welcome users, provide quick access to each major feature, and give advocates a sense of what's happening across schools.

The main actions (reporting an incident, viewing the map, seeing others' reports and joining discussions) are front and center. We've also added a clean prfile block and soft visualizations that preview recent trends. This allowed us to achieve our goal of making it easy to jump in while reinforcing a sense of community and purpose. At the bottom, the navigation bar allows the user to quickly make a report or view the map quickly from any screen.

This helped us meet our goal of creating a space where advocates act quickly, stay informed, and feel anchored in a larger movement for equity and transparency.

Reporting Flow

The Reporting Flow was built to feel approachable and empowering. From the start, users are given the option of their privacy level, so that they have control over how their report is used. Next, users can describe what happened in their own voice, while helpful tooltips and prompts provide just enough structure without feeling rigid.

We focused on making this flow easy to start, with optional fields that allow users to include as much or as little context as they are comfortable sharing.

This design supports our goal of capturing lived experiences in a way that's easy to share, organize, and act on, making community reporting a tool for both storytelling and change.

Discussion Board

We designed the discussion board to feel like a space for students and advocates to connect. Each sub-board is organized by key topics like policing, discipline, or mental health, giving users a focused polace to share stories, ask questions, and offer support.

The body of the post takes center stage with clean typography, making it easy for other to read and reflect. Below, replied are threaded, helping users follow conversations and offer support.

This flow not only supports community building, but also reinforces our broader goal of making qualitative experiences visible, valued, and actionable.

Map Flow

The map flow gives users a spatial understanding of where incidents are being reported across school districts. We designed it to feel clear and purposeful, surfacing recent reports through heatmapping. Users can filter by school type, school level, and funding, helping them quickly identify patterns and hotspots.  

To support different need and contexts, we also built a map settings page where users can adjust display preferences, enable high-contrast modes, and simplify map views for better legibility.

By connecting stories to geography and offering control over how data appears, this flow tied directly into out goal of supporting organizers in targeting their advocacy while ensuring the experience remained accessible and actionable.

District Scorecard Flow

This flow gives advocates a quick, clear view of what's happening in a given district. They are able to view top level insights for the district during a chosen period of time, and then are able to filter and dive into individual reports to better understand patterns, stories, and urgency.

This directly supported our goal of helping advocates surface disparities, identify urgent needs, and tie quantitative data to qualitative narratives.

07. Looking Back

Winning
Moments:

  • Building trust with leadership. Having clear alignment with leadership early on gave me the confidence and trust to own major parts of the strategy and product direction.

  • Turning transcripts into direction. I didn't have fresh user research, but I was able to turn this missing step in my UX process into an opportunity to learn new methods of research.

  • Responding to tough feedback. When we learned that our designs weren't accessible enough, I didn't defend it. I redesigned it.

Lessons
Learned:

  • UX isn't always linear. I couldn't follow my usual playbook. I had to adapt, trust my insticts, and learn how to extract insights from whatever data I had.

  • Constraints can sharpen creativity. The limited timeframes, altered processes, and minimal feedback pushed me to be more resourceful and intentional.

  • Strategy is part of design. While thinking through user needs was a major step in the process, each decision had to be weighed with what would move the mission forward and make the platform sustainable.

Skills
Acquired:

  • Product Strategy. I was able to strategically think of how to align user needs with business goals through prioritized features, roadmap goals, and platform tradeoffs.

  • Figma Prototyping. I used advanced Figma prototyping skills to simulate full interaction flows and demo the product experience.

  • Designing for Accessibility. I designed accessible flows and components using WCAG principles to support an inclusive user experience for all users and abilities.