Role:
Lead UX Designer
Scope:
End-to-End Product
Collaborators:
CTO, Product, Engineering
End-to-end UX strategy for KnowWhat® a comprehensive school safety management system developed alongside school stakeholders, combining emergency planning, visitor oversight, behavioral assessments, mass communication, and daily operations into a single, workflow-driven platform aligned with NIMS and FEMA guidelines.
01 – Overview
KnowWhat® was developed alongside school stakeholders to address administrative challenges and promote best practice-guided emergency planning and preparedness.
The goal: school administration-centered design for optimizing emergency planning, prevention, and daily operations all under one login.
School administrators and safety personnel were managing critical workflows across a fragmented patchwork of documents, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools. High-pressure safety decisions were being made with incomplete information and zero shared context. I led end-to-end UX design to unify these workflows into a single, 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 were managed separately, with no unified view or shared source of truth.
Cognitive Overhead
Safety workflows often occur under time pressure. Scattered tools forced users to context-switch at exactly the wrong moments.
No Collaborative Foundation
Behavioral assessments and emergency responses involve multiple stakeholders, but there was no platform designed for cross-team coordination.
Scalability Gap
Existing tools didn't scale across buildings, departments, or district-wide reporting needs limiting the platform's growth potential.
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 structural grammar — Home/Overview → Sub-navigation tabs → Action / Detail — making the platform intuitive and easy to learn from the very first module.
A persistent branded left-side navigation (featuring the Drift Net brand and all 12 modules) provides global orientation at all times, while module-scoped tabs handle sub-navigation.
User permission levels form a foundational part of the platform’s information architecture. The system supports two clear permission tiers:
Designing for both roles simultaneously shaped every screen to function effectively at two altitudes, high-level district oversight for Super-Admins and granular, day-to-day management for school Admins. These permissions control navigation visibility, available modules, and allowable actions, enabling the platform to scale seamlessly from a single school to an entire district.
shared platform elements
This consistent structure, combined with thoughtful role-based permissions, delivers a scalable, secure, and user-friendly experience tailored to both district and school needs.
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 to align on technical constraints, partnered with Product on prioritization, and worked directly with engineering to ensure interaction patterns translated faithfully to 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 collaborated with school stakeholders throughout the design of Visitor Management and Emergency Planning. incorporating real operational input to ensure workflows matched ground-level security practice and best-practice preparedness standards.
09 – Design system
Rather than designing each module in isolation, I built a shared design system establishing reusable patterns navigation structures, card layouts, permission tabs, status indicators, data tables, form conventions, and CTA styles that scaled cleanly across all ten modules.
This system dramatically reduced the cost of adding new modules, kept the product visually consistent, and gave engineering a reliable component contract. It also laid the foundation for future product expansion with minimal design debt.
10 – Business Outcomes
Reduced administrative complexity
Consolidated safety planning, visitor management, emergency procedures, and documentation into a single workflow-driven platform eliminating context switching and reducing 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
Designed collaborative workflows enabling administrators, safety personnel, and response teams to operate from a shared source of truth.
Increased product adoption
Reduced friction between modules and improved discoverability of key safety tools, encouraging broader engagement across the platform.
Improved decision confidence
Prioritized hierarchy and contextual guidance to support faster, more confident decision-making during critical safety situations.
Scalable product foundation
Established reusable interaction patterns and system structures supporting multiple modules and providing a clean foundation for future product expansion.
11 – Reflections
Systems thinking at scale
Designing 10 - 11 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. Clarity, hierarchy, and confidence-building became non-negotiable design requirements rather than nice-to-haves.
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.
