UX & Product Consultant
GovTech Responsive Web App
(2025)
The Project
Youth Connector is a City of Seattle–led product initiative designed to reduce friction in how youth ages 12–24 discover and access programs that support their growth, wellbeing, and future success. The product addresses a core problem identified through research: despite significant public investment in youth services, many young people are unaware of available opportunities or struggle to navigate fragmented, inconsistent information. Youth Connector brings mentors, internships, classes, job training, recreation, and mental health resources into a single, intuitive digital experience, while extending reach through channels youth already use. In Q3 & Q4 of 2025, I partnered closely with the Product Lead as a UX consultant, shaping product strategy from early discovery and ideation through design validation and delivery to ensure the solution was usable, accessible, and grounded in real youth needs.
Goals
Create a single, trusted digital product that centralizes youth programs, opportunities, and supports across the city.
Reduce discovery and access friction for youth ages 12–24, particularly those disconnected from traditional outreach channels.
Increase awareness and participation in mentors, internships, classes, job training, and wellbeing resources.
Design an experience that is accessible, inclusive, and grounded in real youth needs through co-design and validation.
Enable scalability and long-term adoption across city departments and partner organizations.
Challenges
Fragmented youth services and inconsistent data across multiple providers and city departments.
Low awareness and trust among youth, many of whom do not actively seek out government-run resources.
Designing for a broad age range (12–24) with varying needs, motivations, and levels of digital literacy.
Balancing speed of delivery with accessibility, usability, and compliance requirements.
Aligning multiple stakeholders while maintaining a clear, youth-centered product vision.
Key Metrics
Incorporate insights from co-design and usability testing with youth ages 12–24.
Address 100% of high- and medium-severity usability issues identified through heuristic analysis and testing.
Translate youth feedback into clearly prioritized design recommendations.
Validate that content structure and language are understandable and relevant across age groups.
Iterative Feedback
Design decisions were continuously shaped through iterative validation. I conducted heuristic analysis and led unmoderated usability testing on interactive prototypes, synthesizing findings into actionable recommendations for the design team. Insights from testing informed refinements across navigation, content structure, and key flows, helping ensure the experience was intuitive, accessible, and aligned with youth needs before final design sign-off.
Communicating the Experience Across Teams
To ensure the experience was clearly understood and implementation-ready, I translated design intent into structured product and UX documentation. I created end-to-end user flows and a sitemap to define the experience architecture, authored user stories and acceptance criteria to guide development, and wrote detailed design annotations to clarify behavior and interaction patterns. I also provided analytics guidance to support future measurement, enabling product, design, and engineering teams to align on what was being built, why it mattered, and how success would eventually be evaluated.
