Saprea — UX & Product Design for Social Impact
Lead UX designer on a multi-platform digital ecosystem serving survivors of childhood sexual abuse — redesigning information architecture, navigation, and brand translation across digital and print surfaces, under trauma-informed design constraints.
Project context
- Role
- Lead UX/UI Designer — UX research, information architecture, UI design, design system foundations, prototyping, stakeholder facilitation
- Timeline
- 2021–2023 · In-house position within a small, cross-functional creative team
- Tools
- Figma · Hotjar · Stakeholder workshops · User journey mapping
- Platforms
- saprea.org · supportgroups.saprea.org · Research reports, event materials, social content
- Team
- Creative manager (print lead) · Lead UX/UI designer (digital lead, cross-disciplinary) · Junior designer (transversal)
- Project type
- Full redesign mandate — information architecture, visual identity translation, design system foundations, internal UX advocacy
The problem
Three independent platforms had grown without shared governance. Each had its own navigation logic, its own visual language, and its own content structure — the result of years of parallel development with no unified design oversight. For users, that meant fragmented journeys: moving between educational resources, support programs, and recovery content required re-orienting from scratch at every transition.
At the same time, the organization was undergoing a significant brand evolution. A new visual identity existed on paper — but translating it coherently across digital platforms, printed research reports, event materials, and social content was still an open problem.
The design challenge was therefore double: fix the structural fragmentation and establish a visual language robust enough to work across every surface the organization touched.
The constraint that made this project unlike most redesigns was the audience. Users navigating these platforms are often survivors, families, or professionals working in a support capacity. In that context, a confusing interface isn't just a friction point — it's a failure of care. Clarity wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the brief.
Research & constraints
Research began with the organizational structure before touching any screen. Stakeholder workshops with content specialists, program leads, and translation teams surfaced a consistent problem: each team had developed their own mental model of what the platforms were for, and those models didn't always align. The fragmentation visible to users reflected a fragmentation that existed internally first.
Behavioral analytics — heatmaps and session recordings via Hotjar — confirmed where the navigation was failing in practice: the transition points between educational content and support program enrollment were the highest drop-off zones across both platforms. Users were reaching the threshold of the most important journeys and stopping.
User journeys were mapped across both platforms before any wireframe was started. The goal was to understand the full sequence a user might travel — from first contact with the organization to active engagement with a support program — and identify every point where the existing structure worked against that sequence.
Research inputs
- Stakeholder workshops (content, programs, translation teams)
- Hotjar heatmaps & session recordings
- Cross-platform user journey mapping
- Competitive audit of trauma-informed digital organizations
What research surfaced
- Two platforms with no shared navigation logic
- Educational-to-support pathway broken at multiple entry points
- Brand identity undefined for digital and multi-media application
- No component foundation — full rebuild required
Design decisions
Every significant decision on this project carried a constraint absent from most redesigns: the users these platforms serve cannot afford to be confused, lost, or exposed to content out of sequence. That constraint didn't sit alongside the design decisions — it generated them.
A single navigation logic across two platforms
The first structural decision was to establish a shared information architecture across saprea.org and the Support Groups platform — not a unified visual template, but a consistent mental model. A user arriving through any entry point should be able to orient immediately: understand where they are, what the platform offers, and how to reach the resources relevant to them without having to re-learn the structure.
Content sequencing as a care decision
Designing the pathways between educational content and support resources wasn't purely a UX logic problem. In a trauma-informed context, exposure to certain content requires a deliberate, progressive sequence — not because of technical constraints, but because the order in which a user encounters information can itself be harmful if mishandled. The information architecture reflected that: structured progressions, no accidental shortcuts to high-intensity content.
A design system built for a small, cross-disciplinary team
The brand translation work produced the foundations of a design system — not a full component library, but a structured set of decisions about typography, color, spacing, and interaction patterns that could be applied consistently across digital and print surfaces. The constraint here was the team: a creative manager with a print background, a junior profile, and production workflows that didn't always involve a designer. The system had to be simple enough to use without one.
Making UX intent legible across the organization
Introducing more structured UX thinking into the team meant more than documenting processes. Research teams needed to understand the user journeys their content would support. Translation teams needed to understand how interface copy shaped the experience at critical moments. Managers needed to see — and validate — the reasoning behind design decisions that weren't always self-evident. Each of those conversations required a different framing of the same intent.
Outcome & reflections
The redesign produced a coherent digital presence across two platforms — saprea.org and the Support Groups platform — with a shared navigation logic, consistent interaction patterns, and the foundations of a design system that extended beyond digital screens to cover printed research reports, event materials, and social content. The constraint of designing across media types, rather than just screens, shaped every component decision: the system had to be simple enough to apply without a designer in the room.
Making that possible required more than delivering files. The creative team was small and cross-functional — a creative manager with a print background, a junior profile working across disciplines, and an organization where content, research, and translation teams each had their own production workflows. Translating design intent into something these teams could actually act on meant working at three levels simultaneously: hands-on mentoring with the junior profile, close collaboration with research and translation teams to align content production with the user journeys being designed, and ongoing advocacy work with managers to build shared understanding — and buy-in — around the UX decisions being made.
That last part is rarely named as a design skill — but the ability to translate design intent across an organization, to people who don't share the same vocabulary or the same proximity to the user, sits at the core of what design thinking actually means in practice. Not the post-it methodology, but the harder work of making user-centered reasoning legible to the people who shape what gets built.
