Duration
August - December 2025
Role
Product Designer
Team
3 Designers
6 Engineers
2 PMs
2 Tech Leads
Skills
Rapid Prototyping
XFn Collaboration
Design Systems
Usability Testing
// INTERNAL TOOLS, 0 -> 1
NPO staff spend 4 hours making schedules, taking time away from what matters
In a cross-functional team, I designed an automated scheduling tool that transforms messy data and a tedious workflow, into a 35-minute process with a 12% decrease in errors.
// INTRODUCTION
Camp Starfish brings joy to young campers with challenges
Camp Starfish is the only nationwide camp to offer a 1:1 camper-to-counselor ratio for children with emotional, behavioral, and learning challenges. They have a talented team of 106 employees creating real impact for the ~300 children who attend their camps every summer.
They work in a complex, resource-constrained space and have some outdated workflows. The most prominent issue is how they schedule each camp session to maintain this 1:1 ratio while accommodating camper preferences and staff conflicts.
// DEFINING THE PROBLEM
21 pages of scheduling instructions — and more
Every Camp Starfish program administrator goes through a 21-page guide to scheduling, at the minimum. This includes getting familiar with paper-based collection of camper preferences and daily manual assignment to activities.
This multi-step workflow adds up to take a significant amount of an admin's time: ~4 hours to be specific.
Changing a legacy system is never easy, especially when going digital
Beyond workflow pain points, we realized camp admins have varying levels of tech literacy. They've been used to the manual, paper process for years now. We needed to account for this barrier in our solution for high employee adoption.
// SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
An outdated process made smarter; reducing hours and adding joy
Auto-generate a schedule
Admin can now create a schedule in minutes, taking in all preferences and factors through an algorithm that maintains the 1:1 ratio and accommodates constraints
View and manage data
Directory views let admin easily track camper and staff data + preferences in the same place; no need for those paper forms anymore
Make edits, validate errors
Easily iterate and edit generated schedules through drag-and-drop interactions, moving campers and staff between activities while maintaining validation rules
Export the schedule
Done editing? Admin can now export schedules that'll automatically be formatted in Camp Starfish's specialized schedule grid, ready for printing or sharing
// IDEATION && WIREFRAMING
Breaking down the dream scheduling task flow
The designers put their heads together to imagine what the new journey would look like. We simplified the process into 3 steps, ideating together but each owning the low-fidelity wireframes. I sketched the export step below.
Google Suite as our design North Star
In our stakeholder research, we noticed that staff were most familiar with Google Suite applications, like Sheets and Calendar. To remain mindful of their tech literacy levels, I used these applications as points of reference for our mid-fidelity wireframes.
Iterations: a fresh perspective every week
While our 3-step process remained the same, we fleshed out sub-processes within each step as we realized the scope of operations this tool needed to support.
Initially, a user would simply import all data, without further input on the application. Upon iteration, we chose to also allow users to create activities and add them to a session before they generated a schedule.
// COLLABORATION += ORGANIZATION
We conducted weekly cross-functional reviews to get early buy-in and stakeholder alignment
Despite our rapid sprints, we kept an open line of communication between cross-functional partners. Nothing went to production without review from the PMs, Tech Leads, and designers. This included presenting weekly updates to the NPO.
IN-PERSON CROSS-FUNCTIONAL REVIEW
In a team of 3 designers, I led the organization of our design file, system, and documentation
Our larger, cross-functional team included mostly junior designers and engineers. So, I took ownership of establishing some guidelines to bring structure and UX maturity to our design process.
DESIGN PROCESSES AND ORGANIZATION
// USABILITY TESTING
Staff were overjoyed to see a digital version of their workflow
We conducted 4 usability tests with staff ranging in experience levels to identify critical issues before implementation. Across our testers, two emotions stayed constant: shock and delight. Many highlighted the ease of using this application as a first-time visitor.
I created the testing guide, adapting it to our audience and their day-to-day operations. How would this fit into their morning routine? What would they do if a camper had a last minute preference change?
USABILITY TEST WITH ADMIN
Key insight #1: Feedback for user action
Users especially appreciated feedback in the form of toasts and dialogs. For critical actions, they wanted messages to be more emphasized or prominent than an icon.
ITERATION: NEW CONFIRMATION TOAST FOR GENERATION
Key insight #2: Clarity with data viewing
Out of the two options we presented for data viewing (search, sort, filter), 4/4 users discovered and preferred table-wide operations over column-specific ones. This was one of the few points of differentiation from our reference of Google Sheets.
DECISION: COLUMN-SPECIFIC VS. TABLE-WIDE ACTIONS
// IMPACT
Our internal tool transformed Camp Starfish's scheduling workflow, with a 81.25% decrease in time-on-task, and a 13% decrease in error rate
In a low-resource space, our solution restores wasted hours for staff. They can focus their energy on their mission: bringing joy to young campers every summer. This tool will be used for all incoming session scheduling for the near future.
A personal win was listening to the staff talk about how the UX felt and their excitement to use the tool. Hear about it directly from them:
// RETROSPECTIVE
Open communication and collaboration form the foundations of good design
This project really highlighted the importance of cross-functional collaboration and buy-in. Each screen is a result of significant back-and-forth, tradeoffs, and discussion until we arrived at solutions all stakeholders were happy with.
Consistent communication and check-ins helped us take frequent pulses on how we were feeling about direction. When engineers pushed back on feasibility, I adapted. When clients pushed back on usability, I advocated. Finding that balance required trust built through transparent collaboration.
If I had more time, I would…
Co-design with admin and staff to better include their perspective from the beginning, rather than just in usability testing
Thank you for reading <3
Please reach out if this project resonated with you.