Role:
Lead UX Designer
Scope:
End-to-End Product
Collaborators:
CTO, Product, Engineering
End-to-end UX strategy for KnowWhat®, a school safety platform built alongside real school stakeholders. It brings emergency planning, visitor oversight, behavioral assessments, mass communication, and daily operations into one workflow, aligned with NIMS and FEMA guidelines.
01 – Overview
KnowWhat® was built with school stakeholders to make emergency planning and preparedness easier to manage, with one clear goal: bring planning, prevention, and daily operations under a single login.
Before KnowWhat, school administrators and safety personnel pieced workflows together across documents, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools, often making high-pressure safety decisions without the full picture. I led the end-to-end UX design to bring those workflows into one connected, role-aware platform.
02 – My Contributions
End-to-End UX Strategy
Information Architecture
Design System
Workflow Mapping
UI & Interaction Design
Cross-functional Collaboration
03 – the problem
Fragmentation
Visitor logs, emergency plans, threat assessments, and drill records all lived in separate places, with no shared view of any of it.
Cognitive Overhead
Safety workflows happen under time pressure, and scattered tools forced people to switch context at exactly the wrong moments.
No Collaborative Foundation
Behavioral assessments and emergency responses involve multiple people, but nothing was built for teams to coordinate together.
Scalability Gap
Existing tools couldn't scale across buildings, departments, or district-wide reporting, which limited how far the platform could grow.
04 – platform scope
Visitor Management
Pre-approval, QR check-in, access control, restricted visitor screening
Security Assessments
Physical, vulnerability, and general safety assessment workflows
Emergency Plans
Staffing complement, transportation, demographics, preparedness data
Maps
Floor plans, emergency routes, and campus building maps
Drills & Exercises
Orientation meetings, tabletop exercises, and full-scale drills
Mass Communication
Targeted messaging, scheduling, and template management
Threat Assessments
Structured multi-stage investigation workflows for behavioral threats
Dashboard
Real-time safety metrics, visitor activity, and drill status
Personnel
Bulk staff upload, complement tracking, and role management
Classroom Management
Teacher, class, and attendance oversight from one hub
05 – Ux Strategy & Information Architecture
Platform
Module
Sub-Section
Action / Detail
Every module follows the same pattern: Home/Overview → Sub-navigation tabs → Action / Detail. Once you learn one module, you know them all.
A persistent left-side nav, branded for Drift Net and listing all 10 modules, keeps people oriented at all times, while tabs inside each module handle sub-navigation.
User permissions are a core part of the platform’s structure. There are two tiers:
Designing for both roles at once meant every screen had to work at two altitudes: high-level oversight for Super-Admins, and granular, day-to-day management for school Admins. Permissions control what each role sees and can do, so the platform scales cleanly from one school to an entire district.
shared platform elements
That consistent structure, paired with role-based permissions, makes the platform scalable, secure, and easy to use, for districts and individual schools alike.
06 – design principles
Hierarchy over decoration
Every screen leads with the most critical information. Visual weight and spacing guide users to primary actions before secondary options.
Workflow-first, not feature-first
Modules were designed around what users needed to accomplish, not around the system's data model. Workflows map to real administrative tasks.
Context at every step
Inline guidance, status indicators, and completion signals keep users oriented without relying on memory or external documentation.
Shared, not siloed
Collaborative workflows were designed for multi-stakeholder use from the ground up, not retrofitted after the fact.
07 – design highlights
Visitor Management
Freeing staff from time-consuming access control without compromising security
Click through to see how the visitor check-in flow keeps people safe.
Act immediately
The home screen surfaces the three critical actions up front.
Screening isn’t optional
Admin-controlled checks run on every check-in, with an unmissable restriction alert.
Nothing goes unrecorded
Identity verification plus a full audit trail on every visit.
Dashboard
A real-time safety pulse across all modules in a single view
Click through how the dashboard helps readiness at a glance.
Three-zone command center
The dashboard brings together assessment progress, weekly drills, threat reports, and a live visitor panel. Each section links straight to its module. Color-coded threat badges and visitor photos make quick triage and identification easy.
Assessments
A four-level drill-down that makes compliance visible at a glance
A guided walkthrough of a sample security assessment.
Status you can read at a glance
Color-coded progress rings show status without opening a single report.
One visual language, top to bottom
Rings become bars become question counts, so assessors know the scope before they start.
Answer in place, adapt in place
Yes/No answers take notes and photos inline, with follow-ups appearing in context.
Drills & Exercises
Structured preparedness workflows from planning to reporting
A guided walkthrough of how a school plans, staffs, and runs its emergency preparedness.
A shared vocabulary, built in
OM, TTE, DR, FE, and FSE badges, plus built-in state mandates, keep every exercise type easy to recognize.
Scoped before it starts, accountable throughout
Configurable roles and grade-level participant selection scope every exercise before it begins.
A record that proves compliance
Every exercise keeps a searchable, color-coded log and ends with a deliberate “Mark as Complete” step.
Threat Assessments
A structured, multi-stage investigation workflow for behavioral threats
A guided walkthrough of a threat investigation, from start to signed-off.
Framed and structured from the start
Three guiding principles set a shared mental model before a case begins, then a 7-tab flow tracks it through to Review.
Guidance for every judgment call
Interview tracks, a warning-sign taxonomy, and guided classification scaffold every hard decision.
Nothing incomplete, nothing lost
A final Review screen catches gaps before sign-off, and color-coded severity keeps priority cases visible.
08 – cross-functional collaboration
I ran working sessions with the CTO on technical constraints, partnered with Product on prioritization, and worked closely with engineering to make sure every interaction pattern held up in implementation.
CTO
Technical feasibility, architecture constraints, database alignment
Product + Sales
Feature prioritization, roadmap planning, business requirements
Engineering
Component specs, edge cases, implementation pattern reviews
I also worked directly with school stakeholders on Visitor Management and Emergency Planning, bringing in real operational input so the workflows matched how safety actually works on the ground.
09 – Design system
Rather than designing each module in isolation, I built a shared design system: navigation structures, card layouts, permission tabs, status indicators, data tables, form conventions, and CTA styles that scaled cleanly across all ten modules.
It cut the cost of adding new modules, kept the product visually consistent, and gave engineering a reliable set of components to build from, laying the groundwork for future growth with minimal design debt.
10 – Business Outcomes
Reduced administrative complexity
Brought safety planning, visitor management, emergency procedures, and documentation into one platform, cutting context switching and overhead.
Increased user efficiency
Simplified high-frequency workflows and surfaced critical information at the right moments, reducing cognitive effort during time-pressured safety tasks.
Improved cross-team collaboration
Built collaborative workflows so administrators, safety personnel, and response teams all work from the same source of truth.
Increased product adoption
Reduced friction between modules and made key safety tools easier to find, encouraging broader use across the platform.
Improved decision confidence
Used hierarchy and contextual guidance to support faster, more confident decisions during critical safety situations.
Scalable product foundation
Established reusable interaction patterns and system structures that support multiple modules and give the product a clean foundation to grow from.
11 – Reflections
Systems thinking at scale
Designing ten interconnected modules reinforced the value of building shared structure early. Consistent patterns reduced both design and engineering effort over time.
Designing for high-stakes use
Safety tools operate under emotional and time pressure, so clarity, hierarchy, and confidence-building weren't nice-to-haves. They were requirements.
Domain expertise as design input
Collaborating with school stakeholders and personnel produced workflows that reflected real operational logic, something no amount of internal iteration could replicate.
IA is a strategic decision
The choice to give every module a consistent navigational grammar was the architectural decision that made the platform feel like one product instead of many.
