Team:
Andrea Lacorazza, Dori Jacobson, Joseph Kwesiga, Jordan Levine, Kamari Patrick, Katie Stahlhuth, Katy Ashe, Saehee Lee, Zach Witkin

Role:
While working with the YLabs team, I was responsible for product design, low to high-fidelity prototyping, remote testing, and synthesis. In developing the product, I worked alongside developers and the product manager to deliver the final product.

Problem:
In the U.S., many youths lack the necessary information to make informed health decisions and face barriers to accessing care. By age 19, 71% are sexually active, yet only 43% of high schools provide comprehensive sex education. This leads young people to rely on unreliable sources for information. Almost 50% of new STI cases are in individuals aged 15-24, with increased risks for youth of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Solution:
Asking For A Friend is a website that provides a bridge to action for young people; transforming youth healthcare with informed choices and seamless access to their most stigmatized health care needs.

Key offerings:
Decision Support is A virtual counselor that addresses sexual health concerns and provides evidence-based, stigma-free information through interactive quizzes driven by the most pressing questions that young people have.

Service Wayfinder is a no-stress linkage to care where we guide young people by directly addressing their top concerns around the legality, affordability, and confidentiality of accessing health care. Turning traditionally difficult-to-navigate government programs into simple step-by-step instructions that make it possible for youth to access benefits.

FAQs are a collection of questions youths may be afraid/hesitant to ask that covering a range of topics.

Outcome:
Launched in California on June 1, 2024, and co-designed with 270 youths (94% people of color, 57% LGBTQ+), the website has reached significant milestones as of November 2024: over 1 million social media views, 54,442 website views, 28,000 unique users, 92% month-to-month growth, and over 5,000 completed Decision Support quizzes.

Team:
Aly Beeman, Faith Anne Acam, Geetika Pandya, Joseph Kwesiga, Jordan Levine, Saehee Lee, Tanya Bhandari

Role:
As the project lead in Uganda for YLabs, I was responsible for user research, prototyping, testing, stakeholder and partner engagement, overseeing pilot construction, and documentation.

Problem:
Women and girls in refugee camps lack access to sanitary pads, washing supplies, and safe, private spaces for managing menstruation. This affects an estimated 3 million individuals.

Solution:
In partnership with Alight and Kuja Kuja, YLabs co-designed the Cocoon Mini, a semi-permanent latrine and bathing area within household compounds, to streamline and safeguard the menstruators’ experience. The intervention increased access to water and addressed menstrual hygiene management on a household level, with 95% of menstruators reporting it made menstrual hygiene management easier for them.

Outcome:
We completed design research, co-design, and rough prototyping with 61 participants. Four prototypes were tested with 84 participants, and 20 'Cocoon Mini' units were constructed for a pilot study with 193 community members over 3 months. In total, 338 members of the Bidibidi settlement took part in the co-creation of the Cocoon project.

Our research, published in BMC Women's Health, highlights the potential of the Cocoon Mini as a cost-effective and impactful solution for humanitarian contexts.

Diwala is a skill verification platform that creates an unchangeable record of skills & achievements, verified with blockchain technology.

The platform enables work for local and international job opportunities and allows for people to take ownership of their data and allowing them to share a private encrypted key that grants access to verified details & documents.

Diwala aims to building an ecosystem of trusted digital skill identities in order to combat certification and identity fraud, creating global opportunities for youth.

I worked with Diwala as a user experience designer in their pilot phase in Uganda, designing iterations of their web and mobile platform for initial testing and aided in conducting user research and testing.

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A simple UX/UI rethink of Soundcloud current mobile platform.

Full Project

‘Awesome Day Hard Day’ is a game about children suspected of having ADHD.

Comb is a strategy board game with the objective of taking over the opponent’s colony.

Agricultural biotechnology: Feeding the world through science

UX/UI // Product Design // Strategy

A conceptual re-design of Unique Board's company profiles. Developing  social functions to foster collaborative interaction. Allowing for companies to easily maintain brand look and feel across projects and profiles.

Unique Board is a creative talent sourcing network. The ability for companies to advertise open positions on projects was paramount. At its core the point of the Unique Board is to create opportunities for creative collaboration.

Additionally, the redesign had to include insights into user actions pertaining to brand products, projects and campaigns, allowing for further consumer metrics.

The goal was to imagine a process in which the consumers are involved and are able to influence the outcome of a company's deliverables by their interactions with the company's social profile.

After studying why sites like Kickstarter and Rocket Hub work and prototyping ways to mix that with a social network like Facebook or Twitter I came up with a concept that gives the user the ability to influence a company's product or service.

After researching Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Kickstarter I was able to find a balance of where social presence and brand exposure.

Essentially what this concept is meant to achieve is make a company profile feel more alive instead of like a corporation. To make it feel like something relatable to the user and their market. This was a big point that came from user interviews on why they engaged with sites like Kickstarter. They felt like their inputs, however small, were directly influencing an outcome in the company.

Optimizing Unique Board user's visual experience and social engagement opportunities.

Some portraits I made along with some of the creative process .
 Titles: Noemie Walter, and Iryna.