Case Study
Digital Transformation
When my employer, Ally Bank, sought to augment its financial philanthropy with professional services, I volunteered to lead a pro-bono design initiative for Leading on Opportunity, an organization dedicated to improving economic mobility in the Charlotte, North Carolina metropolitan region. Their mission needed more than a static website—it required a dynamic platform that could scale with growing community engagement. Through structured design thinking and strategic frameworks, I architected a vision for transforming their digital presence into a hub for community-driven research and collaboration, creating a foundation for sustainable impact.
Leading on Opportunity needed to transform their static website into a platform that could better serve their mission of improving economic mobility in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Complication
The organization faced complex challenges in making economic mobility data accessible and actionable while serving diverse stakeholder needs with limited resources.
Resolution
I led a pro-bono design initiative that delivered a strategic framework and implementation roadmap for progressive platform development.
Outcome
The organization gained a clear vision for digital transformation and practical tools for evaluating future technology investments aligned with community needs.
This case study, published here with client’s permission, examines my approach to transforming an ambiguous product design challenge into a coherent and scalable digital strategy. It's an example of how I've tackled a variety of complex challenges that required forward-thinking design leadership throughout my career. The project's scope encompassed multiple stakeholder groups, diverse data ecosystems, and evolving user needs, requiring careful synthesis of market research, systematic framework development, and clear strategic vision.
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Context
In 2022, Leading on Opportunity (LOO), a non-profit entity of the Foundation For The Carolinas, sought to transform their digital presence to better serve their mission of improving economic mobility in Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg county. Their vision statement captured their ambitious goal:
Within a generation, every child in Charlotte will have an equal chance to achieve social and economic success.
As a design leader at Ally—headquartered in Charlotte—I volunteered my professional services to direct a discovery effort to envision how they could evolve from a minimally interactive informational website into a dynamic platform for community-driven socioeconomic research and digital collaboration. Getting started involved orienting myself and a small team of volunteers around the concept of economic mobility and the many considerations that had emerged from years of research conducted by LOO and its affiliate partners. This meant grounding ourselves in what LOO had established as three determinants:
- Early Care and Education
- College and Career Readiness
- Child and Family Stability
…and two cross-cutting factors:
- Impact of Segregation
- Social Capital
Research
Before engaging with stakeholders on collaborative research and problem-solving, an extensive analysis of LOO's ecosystem and the economic mobility data landscape was conducted to ground the initiative in practical understanding. This preparatory phase examined how different platforms approach the challenge of making complex socioeconomic data accessible and actionable for community stakeholders who need to reveal trends, predict outcomes, and steer investments that drive economic mobility.
Data Environment Assessment
Examination of local and national data resources revealed a rich but fragmented landscape of specialized platforms (figure 1). These platforms demonstrated distinct approaches to data presentation and interaction, each with unique strengths.
- Catalogued interfaces like Results For America excelled at organizing detailed metrics into actionable frameworks.
- Visualization-focused platforms such as the National Equity Atlas specialized in multivariate analysis that could reveal hidden patterns and relationships.
- Geographic tools, exemplified by the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer, provided crucial spatial context by mapping indicators across neighborhoods and jurisdictions.
Figure 1 — Research Artifact
LOO's Trusted Data Sources
Examples of trusted data providers illustrating distinct approaches to surfacing economic mobility insights through catalogued directories, multivariate visualizations, and geographic mapping interfaces. Together, these platforms illustrated both the wealth of available data and the challenge of creating a unified research experience.
Data Perception Framework
The analysis of existing platforms, combined with careful consideration of LOO's organizational requirements, highlighted critical factors that would determine the portal's effectiveness in driving meaningful community engagement. The success of the platform would depend not just on technical capabilities, but on its ability to make economic mobility data accessible and actionable for diverse stakeholders. This initial discovery led to the identification of five foundational principles that would inform our problem-solving approach to ensure the platform could deliver tangible value to Charlotte-Mecklenburg's economic mobility initiatives (figure 2):
Context
Data must tell qualitative and quantitative stories that connect metrics to real community impact. For economic mobility data to be meaningful, it needs to merge seamlessly with historical trends while providing clear narrative context that helps stakeholders understand not just the numbers, but their implications for Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s future.
Utility
Information should enable concrete action and provide the evidence needed to support funding initiatives and policy decisions. The platform must transform raw data into compelling cases for investment by helping users identify opportunities, track outcomes, and demonstrate the potential impact of economic mobility programs through clear metrics and success indicators.
Accessibility
Resources must serve diverse community needs across varying levels of technical expertise, cultural backgrounds, and organizational roles. This means providing multiple paths to insight discovery while ensuring that language, interface design, and functionality are inclusive of different user capabilities and preferences, from neighborhood leaders to policy researchers.
Granularity
Insights should form clear connections from individual resident experiences up through neighborhood-level trends and broader economic mobility patterns. The platform must allow users to zoom between different levels of detail seamlessly, helping them understand how specific local initiatives connect to systemic change while maintaining privacy and statistical validity at each level of analysis.
Transparency
The platform must maintain clear attribution of data sources and methodologies, allowing users to evaluate the credibility and timeliness of every insight. This extends beyond simple citations to include detailed documentation of data collection methods, statistical approaches, and any assumptions or limitations that might affect interpretation, ensuring users can make informed decisions based on their understanding of the data’s context and reliability.
This research established a strong foundation for the subsequent design process, ensuring that stakeholder engagement would be grounded in practical understanding of both technical possibilities and user needs. The insights gained helped shape an approach that would balance sophisticated data capabilities with intuitive user experience, essential for enabling non-data scientists to effectively leverage economic mobility research.
Figure 2 — Research Artifact
Initial Discovery
This artifact documents key insights gathered from Leading On Opportunity during the early stages of the design discovery process. It includes foundational reports like the Opportunity Task Force Report and the 2014 Chetty Study, which provide critical context, recommendations, and strategies for addressing economic mobility. The document also outlines a high-level platform vision for a digital research portal, structured around aspirational, responsive, and predictive metrics. Additionally, it highlights local and national data sources and identifies key data perceptions—such as context, utility, transparency, and granularity—that will guide engagement and adoption. This summary served as a touchstone for ideation, framing the initial design process with clear objectives and community-driven priorities.
Process
The discovery phase began with careful preparation of research materials and stakeholder engagement strategies. I developed an empathy mapping worksheet that was distributed to LOO staff and select community partners before our collaborative sessions. This pre-work ensured participants came prepared with thoughtful insights about user needs and challenges.
Stakeholder Engagement
The discovery process involved collaborative workshops with LOO staff and community partners to systematically map key dimensions of economic mobility research engagement. Through structured empathy mapping exercises, critical patterns emerged around how different stakeholders approach, evaluate, and utilize data in pursuit of community impact:
Objectives
The primary goals driving data engagement centered on securing financial resources for community programs and developing evidence-based approaches to neighborhood improvement that could demonstrate clear impact potential.
Activites
Stakeholder workflows consistently involved tracking quantifiable progress indicators in education and community wellbeing, with particular emphasis on metrics that could demonstrate program effectiveness and identify areas requiring intervention.
Influences
Information-seeking behaviors showed strong preference for digital tools that align with familiar consumer technology experiences, while research patterns indicated heavy reliance on established institutional and social networks for discovering relevant data.
Obstacles
Research effectiveness was frequently hampered by the dispersed nature of economic mobility data across multiple platforms and organizations, coupled with inconsistent methods for organizing and sharing insights across stakeholder groups.
This preparatory work and initial discovery laid the foundation for our formal design process. Given the initiative's scope as a pro-bono engagement focused on creating a strategic vision and funding roadmap, I deliberately structured our approach around the first three stages of Design Thinking (figure 3):
Empathize
Deep observation and engagement to uncover unstated needs and motivations that traditional requirements gathering might miss.
Define
Synthesis of research insights into clear problem statements and opportunity areas that can guide solution development.
Ideate
Potential solutions through structured creative exercises that push beyond obvious answers to find innovative approaches.
Figure 3 — Research Artifact
Approach
Three initial stages of the Design Thinking methodology were used for problem-solving in the development of these materials and recommendations. Solutions that derive from Design Thinking are grounded in empathy to ensure the wants, needs and expectations of the user are not overlooked or overwhelmed by the complexity of the system being designed.
This focused approach allowed us to deliver maximum value within our constraints while providing LOO with the essential strategic foundation they needed to secure future funding and development resources. By concentrating our efforts on deep user understanding, clear problem definition, and creative solution exploration, we could develop a compelling vision and practical roadmap without getting caught in the technical complexities of full prototype development.
Empathy
Deep Discovery Through Structured Engagement
Building on our preliminary research and pre-work insights, I designed and facilitated a comprehensive discovery process to understand the needs of LOO's diverse stakeholders.
In March 2022, I led an empathy mapping workshop that employed the technique of arranging sticky notes on a bullseye diagram to organize, contextualize, and prioritize inputs for various user objectives, activities, obstacles, and influences (figure 4). Pre-work insights were positioned near the center of our mapping space, while new community-level insights were captured toward the outer edges. This deliberate approach created a rich dialogue between individual perspectives and collective wisdom about how stakeholders engage with economic mobility data.
Figure 4 — Research Artifact
Empathy Map
Outcome of collaborative workshopping with Ally and LOO, informed by pre-work conducted with strategic partners to identify the objectives (green), activities (blue), influences (red), and obstacles (gold) for each user persona. During the workshop, green, blue, red, and gold inputs were placed on a bullseye diagram where proximity to the center indicates urgency. Purple notes around the perimeter are verbatims recorded during the workshop.
The workshop insights underwent rigorous synthesis, beginning with a systematic re-sorting of empathy mapping inputs to distinguish high-priority user needs from lower-level concerns (figure 5). This prioritization framework organized findings across three key personas: Neighborhood Leader/NPO Partner, Funder, and LOO User. The exercise proved invaluable in identifying the most critical requirements for platform design.
Figure 5 — Research Artifact
Prioritization
Re-sorting of inputs and notes from empathy mapping exercise to more clearly distinguish high priorities from lower level concerns by persona.
In April 2022, we further refined these insights through affinity mapping (figure 6), categorizing the prioritized inputs into thematic groups centered on needs, goals, and expectations. This systematic analysis revealed patterns that would inform our platform's information architecture and user experience design. Key themes emerged around data accessibility, research collaboration, and community engagement.
Figure 6 — Research Artifact
Affinity Diagram
Inputs and notes from empathy mapping are synthesized as themes (self-service, credibility, storytelling, etc.) grouped and associated for use as a conceptual framework for journey mapping, which followed almost immediately, as well as to inform design ideation in the weeks ahead.
The empathy phase culminated in the development of comprehensive journey maps (figure 7). These documents traced how users think and behave as they progress through stages of finding, discovering, and engaging with economic mobility research. The journey maps provided crucial insights into user workflows and helped identify strategic opportunities for platform intervention.
Figure 7 — Research Artifact
Journey Maps
Informed by empathy and affinity mapping, journey maps reveal insights on what users may be expecting, thinking and doing as they go through the steps of finding, managing, and engaging a process, tool, or system to achieve a goal or solve a problem. These insights are used to design simpler, more effective and intelligent user experiences that anticipate where, when, and how to meet needs and expectations.
Throughout this discovery process, we maintained meticulous documentation and regularly validated our findings with stakeholders. This systematic approach to empathy ensured our subsequent design decisions would be firmly grounded in user needs and organizational realities.
Definition
Creating a Strategic Framework for Growth
Building on our empathy research insights, the Define stage focused on creating a structured approach to platform development that would balance immediate needs with long-term scalability. This resulted in a strategic framework that mapped user engagement patterns against implementation phases.
First, we distilled our user research into four distinct stages of engagement that reflected how stakeholders would interact with the platform (figure 8):
Approach
Users seeking initial understanding begin with broad exploration, often uncertain of their specific needs. They require clear entry points and intuitive access to high-level economic mobility metrics.
Engage
As users develop clearer goals, they need tools to explore specific topics and areas. This stage demands robust data provider integration and comparative analysis capabilities.
Activate
Committed users require features for organizing and collaborating on research. This stage focuses on project workspaces and knowledge-sharing functionality.
Communicate
Advanced users seek to leverage community expertise and share insights. This stage emphasizes features that facilitate collective impact through collaboration.
Figure 8 — Strategy Artifact
Design Scope
Portal tasks and objectives (i.e., journeys) for improving economic mobility from a user’s point of view, broken down into four progressive engagement contexts: Approach, Engage, Activate, and Communicate. This list captures the depth and breadth of user engagement that will enable a community of digital adopters to acquire, collaborate, coordinate, and align on insights from data providers to reveal trends, predict outcomes, and steer investment.
Scaling the Portal
With these engagement stages defined, we developed a Crawl-Walk-Run implementation strategy (figure 9) that would allow the platform to scale sustainably:
Crawl
Seed the platform with essential metrics, insights, directives, and resources that represent LOO's identity and mission. Focus on establishing credibility and providing immediate value to first-time users.
Walk
Unlock utility through research and tools for collaboration. Enable users to engage with third-party data providers and begin building a community of practice around economic mobility research.
Run
Increase engagement by enabling and promoting knowledge-sharing and social networking features. Focus on scaling user-generated content and fostering organic growth of the research community.
Figure 9 — Strategy Artifact
Crawl, Walk, Run
Visualization of the platform development stages—Crawl, Walk, and Run—mapped to user objectives for economic mobility. The diagram shows how foundational components like an informational website, dashboard, and portal (Crawl) support initial exploration, while intermediate tools such as faceted search, membership, and cloud-based capabilities (Walk) enable deeper engagement and collaboration. Advanced features like blogs, wikis, and marketing (Run) foster community-driven interaction and knowledge sharing. Colored connections illustrate how user intents from thematic categories—Approach, Engage, Activate, and Communicate—are addressed progressively through these stages, creating a clear path for platform growth and user experience optimization.
Oganizing Considerations
These two frameworks—engagement stages and implementation phases—formed the axes of our Considerations Matrix (figure 10). This strategic tool mapped over 100 potential platform features against both user objectives and development stages, allowing us to:
- Prioritize and sequence features for viability, feasibility, and value
- Ensure each development stage delivered meaningful utilty
- Plan for scalability while maintaining focus on core user needs
Figure 10 — Strategy Artifact
Considerations
Matrix of user considerations for achieving economic mobility, structured by user intent (‘I want to…‘) and grouped into thematic rows—Approach, Engage, Activate, and Communicate. Each theme represents a stage of user interaction, from initial exploration to leveraging community insights. Columns represent platform components categorized into Crawl, Walk, and Run stages, which denote progressive levels of platform capability. The matrix highlights how specific features align with user goals across these stages, providing a detailed roadmap for optimizing the platform.
Strategic Data Architecture
A crucial component of our Define stage was the development of a forward-looking data schema (figure 11). Rather than simply providing a technical specification, this schema served as a strategic tool to illustrate the complexity inherent in scaling a community research platform.
The schema outlined six key data domains that would need careful consideration:
Opportunities
Users seeking initial understanding begin with broad exploration, often uncertain of their specific needs. They require clear entry points and intuitive access to high-level economic mobility metrics.
Partners
As users develop clearer goals, they need tools to explore specific topics and areas. This stage demands robust data provider integration and comparative analysis capabilities.
Places
Committed users require features for organizing and collaborating on research. This stage focuses on project workspaces and knowledge-sharing functionality.
Community
Advanced users seek to leverage community expertise and share insights. This stage emphasizes features that facilitate collective impact through collaboration.
Activity
Advanced users seek to leverage community expertise and share insights. This stage emphasizes features that facilitate collective impact through collaboration.
Tagging
Advanced users seek to leverage community expertise and share insights. This stage emphasizes features that facilitate collective impact through collaboration.
By presenting this complex data architecture, we effectively communicated that successful platform development would require thoughtful technical planning from the outset. The schema served as a powerful reminder that data strategy should be a key consideration in LOO's funding and development decisions, helping prevent technical debt that could impede future scalability.
Figure 11 — Strategy Artifact
Future-Ready Data Schema
Illustrates the strategic utility of designing a scalable data architecture to support the platform’s long-term growth and user engagement goals. This forward-looking approach served to promote mindful management of data structures during earlier stages, reducing the risk of technical debt and ensuring seamless scalability. By anticipating future needs, the schema serves as a foundation for engineering a robust platform capable of adapting to evolving user demands and supporting meaningful collaboration at every stage of its maturity.
This strategic view of data architecture complemented our user-focused design work, ensuring that LOO's digital transformation vision was grounded in both user needs and technical realities.
The Define stage culminated in a clear platform vision: a scalable digital environment that would grow alongside its community, systematically enabling more sophisticated research and collaboration capabilities while maintaining accessibility for new users. This strategic framework provided LOO with both a compelling vision for their digital transformation and a practical roadmap for implementation, essential elements for their funding and development planning.
Ideation
Translating Strategy into Design Solutions
The ideation phase transformed our strategic framework into a comprehensive set of interface designs that would enable LOO's mission, starting with high-level conceptual thinking and progressively refining into detailed interaction specifications.
Persuasive Dashboard Design
We developed a Level 1 dashboard that leverages persuasion architecture principles to engage different user personas—competitive, spontaneous, methodical, and humanistic—effectively (figure 12). The design presents aggregated metrics and key indicators that provide immediate value while encouraging deeper exploration through progressive disclosure of content and functionality.
Figure 12 — Design Wireframe
Dashboard Concept
Illustrates a wireframe design with asides that outline the principles of persuasion architecture on the right. The wireframe demonstrates an approach to organizing economic mobility data as an entry point to the portal (level 1), featuring metrics, key indicators, organizational partners, financial investors, and user engagement statistics. The asides explain how the design approach addresses different user personas—Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical, and Humanistic—by aligning content and calls to action with their unique motivations. Color-coded markers highlight where each persona’s preferences are met within the wireframe, emphasizing how strategic design can engage diverse audiences effectively.
From this entry point, users can drill down to Level 2 dashboards that offer detailed metrics and segmented navigation for specific determinants (figure 13). This approach maintains consistent orientation while allowing focused exploration of key indicators, partner data, and research insights.
Figure 13 — Design Wireframe
Drill Down on Key Indicators
Showcases the drill-down to level 2 from the primary dashboard. This screen focuses on the ‘Key Indicators’ tab for Early Care and Education determinant, presenting segmented navigation and metrics tied to past, present, and future targets. The content area highlights metrics with links to deeper data layers, including subordinate metrics, actionable tactics, grant opportunities, partner developments, recent investments, and newsworthy events, supporting detailed exploration of economic mobility determinants.
Data Provider Integration
To help users bridge the gap between LOO's platform and external data sources, we designed an interface that transforms LOO from gateway to trusted research facilitator (figure 14). The data provider tab presents curated sources alongside interactive visualizations, allowing users to preview insights before leaving the platform.
Figure 14 — Design Wireframe
Data Providers
Revealing level 2 content beneath the ‘Data Providers’ tab, offering users curated access to trustworthy third-party research sources related to Early Care and Education. A list of data providers is displayed on the left, enabling users to preview map and chart styles without navigating away from the site. The central map visualizes data, such as proximity to early care programs, with interactive elements to reveal key insights and tools directly from the platform. This design helps users maximize the utility of external data sources while maintaining engagement with the platform’s ecosystem.
The interface employs an interstitial modal system that maintains context and encourages engagement (figure 15). This modal provides essential information about each provider's relevance and reliability while offering tools for managing research activities.
Figure 15 — Design Wireframe
Data Provider Modal
This modal is triggered when a user selects a trusted data provider for research. It serves as an interstitial moment, offering curated insights from Leading On Opportunity about the selected provider, including its relevance and reliability. The modal also incorporates community-generated insights on prior research and provides tools for managing research, such as adding the provider to a project workspace or following related key indicators. Designed to facilitate, augment, and maintain the user’s research journey, the modal keeps the user within the portal ecosystem while enabling seamless navigation to the provider’s website in a new tab. By preserving the modal in the background, the platform enhances the research process while encouraging profile creation for long-term engagement and data organization.
For registered users, the modal transforms to enable seamless research organization (figure 16), while new users receive a streamlined onboarding experience (figure 17). This contextual transformation aligns with moments of active engagement to foster long-term participation.
Figure 16 — Design Wireframe
Data Provider Modal: Registered User
For existing members who are already signed in, the modal’s right third transforms into a ‘Save Your Research’ utility when navigating to the provider’s site via the ‘Explore Data’ button. This feature offers progressive disclosure, allowing users to save URLs, notes, or files directly to their selected workspace without leaving the portal. Users can also access their full workspaces for further research management. By keeping the save utility active in the background, the design supports seamless research organization while maintaining continuity with the external data provider. This approach enhances the member experience by streamlining data capture and workspace integration during active research.
Figure 17 — Design Wireframe
Data Provider Modal: Sign-in/Sign-up
After an unsigned user navigates to the provider’s site via the ‘Explore Data’ button, the modal updates in the background to invite new users to register as community members or prompt returning users to sign in. The right third of the modal highlights the benefits of membership, such as saving research notes, URLs, and data files to a project workspace. Convenient OAuth options streamline the registration process, while a clear reminder encourages existing members to sign in to continue building their research portfolio seamlessly. This transformation aligns with moments of active engagement to foster long-term user participation and data organization.
The system strategically prompts authentication when users attempt to access advanced functionality (figure 18), and uses progressive disclosure to minimize cognitive load when authenticated users interact with research management features (figure 19).
Figure 18 — Design Wireframe
Data Provider Modal: Add to Project Sign-in Prompt
When a new user or unauthenticated member clicks ‘Add to Project…’ from the modal, the modal transforms to prompt registration or sign-in using OAuth for seamless access. The interface highlights the benefits of joining Leading On Opportunity, such as immediate access to research tools, the ability to organize and refine research, and opportunities to collaborate with the community. Simple sign-up options streamline the process, ensuring users can quickly engage with cloud storage functionality to save research from data providers while enhancing their portal experience.
Figure 19 — Design Wireframe
Data Provider Modal: Add to Project Sequence
This sequence demonstrates in-place progressive disclosure for signed-in users when interacting with the ‘Add to Project…’ feature. Clicking the link transforms it into a dropdown selector, allowing users to choose an existing project or create a new one. Selecting ‘Create a new project’ triggers a text box for naming the project. Upon saving, a confirmation message provides immediate feedback that the data provider has been successfully added to the selected project. By keeping all steps contained within the same area of interaction, this design minimizes cognitive load and streamlines the workflow for organizing research.
Research Hub
The research section emphasizes collaborative knowledge-sharing (figure 20), presenting curated and community-contributed insights with clear attribution and credibility indicators. User profiles highlight expertise and contributions (figure 21), fostering organic networking and collaboration.
Figure 20 — Design Wireframe
Research
Revealing level 2 content beneath the ‘Research’ tab, offering curated and community-shared research related to the current determinant (e.g., Early Care and Education in this case). Each item includes a headline, a brief excerpt, the date, and the source, which may be curated research from Leading On Opportunity staff or shared research from a contributing community member. Red dots highlight new research that the user has not yet reviewed. This layout invites users to explore vetted studies and shared insights, promoting engagement and a collaborative approach to understanding economic mobility topics.
Figure 21 — Design Wireframe
Community Member Profile Modal
This modal provides an overview of a contributing community member, such as Benjamin Wright, who has shared research within the platform. It displays key information, including their username, membership status, areas of focus or expertise, and a summary of their shared data studies. A ‘Follow’ button allows users to connect with the member, fostering networking and collaboration. By revealing relevant metrics and affiliations, the profile modal encourages role-based consulting, influence, and organic community-building centered on shared interests and expertise.
Strategy Catalog
We developed an intuitive navigation system for LOO's extensive collection of strategies (figure 22), using progressive disclosure to manage complexity while maintaining the organization's existing taxonomic structure. This approach respects the formal indexing scheme while making it more accessible to users.
Knowledge Organization
The FAQ system accommodates different learning preferences through multiple exploration paths (figure 23), including categorized browsing, popularity-based quick access, and targeted searching. Cross-referencing between related topics encourages broader understanding of economic mobility factors.
Figure 22 — Design Wireframe
Strategies
Wireframe for ‘Strategies’ tab, demonstrating an approach to making Leading On Opportunity’s constraint of alphabetical indexing of strategies (letters A–U) more intuitive in a navigational context. Strategies for the current determinant, Early Care and Education, are highlighted in gray (letters C, D, and E). Hovering over another letter (e.g., N) will indicate the range of strategy letters (with link affordance shown in blue) belonging to a different determinant, signaling a potential shift in focus for the entire Level 2 view if navigated.
Progressive disclosure is used to reveal strategy details. The initial view provides a concise thumbnail for all strategies in scope for the selected determinant, ensuring users are not overwhelmed. In this example, Strategy D is expanded to show its detailed recommendations, tactics, and critical partners, while Strategies C and E remain collapsed.
This approach allows users to explore the full scope of each strategy only as needed, balancing clarity and accessibility in a way that respects the indexing scheme and supports user engagement.
Figure 23 — Design Wireframe
FAQs
Demonstrates the default view for accessing FAQs related to the currently explored determinant, in this case, Early Care and Education. FAQs are grouped by Key Indicators applicable to the determinant, providing users with a comprehensive sense of scope and relevance. Additional navigation options include ‘Top 20,’ which highlights the most commonly accessed FAQs, and ‘Find,’ a keyword search feature allowing users to locate specific information within the FAQ set. A ‘See also’ section connects users to FAQ content across other determinants or cross-cutting factors where relevant, fostering deeper exploration and understanding of interconnected topics.
This systematic approach to ideation produced a comprehensive set of wireframes demonstrating how LOO could progressively introduce sophisticated capabilities while maintaining an intuitive, engaging user experience. The resulting artifacts provided clear visualization of the platform's potential, essential for securing support and funding for implementation.
Conclusion
Strategic Vision for Community Impact
This pro-bono initiative exemplifies how design leadership can transform ambiguous challenges into actionable strategy. While LOO initially sought a portal concept, our structured approach delivered both an immediate vision and a foundation for sustainable growth. By applying Design Thinking principles strategically—focusing on empathy, definition, and ideation—we created a framework that aligned with LOO's mission while acknowledging the realities of community-driven development.
The engagement's success lay not in prescribing a rigid feature roadmap, but in establishing a clear vision for how digital transformation could amplify LOO's impact on economic mobility. Our deliverables provided LOO with sophisticated understanding of how their platform could evolve alongside growing community engagement, enabling them to make informed decisions about future investments in digital capabilities.
As a product design leader at Ally, this initiative offered a meaningful opportunity to give back to Charlotte-Mecklenburg's community while demonstrating the value of human-centered design in addressing complex social challenges. The work showcases how strategic design thinking can bring clarity to ambiguous problems, whether in corporate product development or community-focused initiatives.
The resulting vision and strategy documents serve as valuable tools for LOO's ongoing mission, providing a thoughtful framework for evaluating and pursuing digital opportunities. While platform development timelines and priorities will naturally evolve with changing community needs and resources, the foundational research and strategic recommendations offer enduring value in understanding how technology can support and scale economic mobility initiatives.
This engagement demonstrates that effective design leadership is about more than creating features or interfaces—it's about developing frameworks that enable organizations to move forward with confidence and clarity, grounded in deep understanding of user needs and organizational capabilities.
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