My role

• I continued to set the direction for the profile management, friend management, and the design visual system, partnering with and acting as a liaison to our engineering team. Click to read about Phase 1.
• I led the quality assessment for our design system ensuring all submitted components promoted best practices and aligned with our guidelines based on Material design 3. I also partnered with our second design team's leads to ensure consistency in both teams' designs.
• I existed as the unofficial third co-team lead for our design 1 team as I found myself assisting both my co-leads with vital SME information from phase 1 and also taking the initiative on design decisions and making myself available as a mentor to my teammates.

Who is Safe Place International (SPI)?

SPI is a non‐profit organization that's helped 800+ double-marginalized LGBTQ+ refugees, asylum seekers, and single mothers worldwide.

• Provides support & resources through a virtual 10‐week structured program called The Dream Academy (TDA).

What's the problem?

• Most TDA members feel unsafe and not secure when using popular social media platforms.
• Post-grad WhatsApp groups are overwhelming & capped at 400 members.
• Alums are lacking ways to network, access resources, report crime safely, & be self-expressive.
• ~50% drop‐off rate in communication and contribution amongst alums
• Recently passed Ugandan LGBTQ+ criminalization laws.

Design response: TDA Connect

The profile and friend management features live within the TDA Connect portal. Alums have complete safety and privacy control over their profiles to represent their true selves and build a community by connecting, with other TDA alums in or outside their cohorts with similar interests.

What were the challenges?

1. How might we build a safe and secure virtual platform for TDA graduates that accounts for low‐bandwidth capabilities and is accessible via mobile and desktop?
2. How might we refine the current designs for profile management to improve usability and customization when filling in profile details?
3. How might we improve the sense of safety and seamlessness for adding friends on the portal?
4. How might we improve the way users manage their friends lists and requests?

Create a portal that:

Provides safety

Builds community

Provides resources

Business goals - MVP

SPI's priority portal features

After meeting with our client to discuss the root user problem further (50% user drop-off rates and the need for a resource center), our team identified the following five portal features as top priorities for phase two of this project. Our team believes that implementing these features will help create a minimal viable product (MVP) and bring success to SPI.

• Profile + Friend management *
• Onboarding
• Social Feed (homepage)
• Groups *
• Resource Center

* Features I worked on.

What needed fixing?

Let's break these two features down

Phase 1 design audits

Heuristic evaluations (HE)

I began my redesigns by reviewing Phase 1's usability testing insights and performing a heuristic eval for the profile management + friend management flows to catch any usability issues.

Yielding these HE insights:

• Privacy page: add privacy toggles for the groups, recent activity, and friends sections.
• Improve navigation (back/exit buttons) and simplify CTA buttons globally.
• Create a 2-part friend request flow, so users can send a note.
• Improve confirmation messages for sent friend requests
• Add a friends list showing mutual friends to the profile page.
• And lastly, redesign the friends list page to improve white space and hierarchy.

Content design audits

During this time, I also collaborated with a content designer on my team to implement changes that improved the copy on the profile and friend management flows.

How did we further define the problem?

Working with the research team

Our research team virtually met with 8 TDA Alums to learn more about their lives and what current issues they're facing post graduation. Prior to the interviews my team and I sent questions/topics to the research team for our users to answer.

Key findings

1. Passion projects are only available in TDA classes.
2. 100% of participants are empowered through helping people.
3. 88% of participants valued acts of kindness.
4. They'd enjoy seeing celebrations/reminders on the portal.

Profile management iterations

Redesigning with intention

Design goals

I continued to use the design goals I defined in phase 1 as I redesigned the profile management flow: encouragement, low‐bandwidth capabilities, customization (self‐expression), and safety.

Embacing project constraints

A lot of the leftover questions from phase 1 regarding design (low‐bandwidth) and security constraints (on an engineering level) were finally answered by our engineers + product managers.

I incorporated the feedback from engineers along with the insights from user interviews as I started redesigning the profile management pages.

Edit profile

I set out to improve the navigation, allowing users to exit or go back while editing their profiles and access the Profile privacy page without opening the hamburger menu.

Solution:

• Full-page dialog design
• Renaming the section officially to profile management combining the two pages

These changes improved usability by adding an exit button and page tabs to swap between Edit profile and Profile privacy.

Working with the content team proved valuable as it helped me remove headings and other clutter to improve the page's whitespace.

Solution: I added Friends, Recent activity, and Groups to this page, allowing users complete privacy control over all content displayed on their profiles.

Final solutions for Profile management

Feature highlights

Because the Profile management feature had most of the designs completed during phase 1. I focused on improving and adding community features for TDA alums.

Previous design and wireframe iterations

I created mid-fi wireframes to help visualize the recommendations and features ideated during crazy 8s. I annotated my workflow to receive direct feedback and help my team get the bigger picture of my designs.

Pivoting...

Early on, I became the sole designer for the friend management features after my teammate departed the project. However, despite the departure, because I led the design decisions for this feature, I was able to carry on effortlessly.

I incorporated the feedback from engineers along with the insights from user interviews as I started redesigning the friend management pages.

Add a friend

Design goals: encouragement, community, and safety

• Simplified call‐to‐action buttons
• Created an optional 2‐part friend request process with editable quick‐add suggestions for sending, thus personalizing this feature.

Task prompt: You see Jaheem's introduction post and want to add him as a friend; how would you go about doing that?

Goal: see how intuitive the newly redesigned 2-part friend request feature was.

Outcomes and design validations: All six users found the task easy and completed it quickly. Yet, one user assumed they were required to include a message.

Design iterations

Incorporating feedback

Post-usability testing I worked with the content team once again to improve the visual hierarchy and provide a seamless user experience for the 2-part add a friend flow.

Visuals

Walk throughs

Success metrics

• Has the portal improved SPI's retention rates?
• Has the percentage of continued passion projects increased?
• Has TDA Connect helped users grow the community?
• Has TDA Connect facilitated connections?
• Do members feel safe using this platform?
• Per user testing for the social feed page: Users felt thankful and safer knowing they can mark their posts on the social feed as “sensitive” by using a list with sensitive topics that I created during phase 1.