Organizing Audiences for More Meaningful Messaging
Organizing Audiences for More Meaningful Messaging
UI/UX
Background
Community was an early-stage startup with a bold vision: to make SMS the most personal and effective communication channel between public figures and their audiences. Celebrities, creators, and brands used Community’s platform to text directly with their fans.
One of my earlier projects at Community was building a feature for managing groups of members (subscribers). We affectionately called it Communities.
At the time, the company had only launched a handful of customers onto the platform. As the sole product designer, I led the design process from concept to shipment across both iOS and our responsive web app. To deliver this, I partnered closely with a product manager and a front-end engineer from each platform.
Problem(s)
Our customers were growing fast, and managing their subscribers had quickly become overwhelming. They needed a way to organize members into meaningful groups to send targeted, relevant messages. Specifically, customers needed:
Group identifiers (name, description, color, image, emoji, created on/by).
Keyword opt-ins: where subscribers could join groups by texting specific keywords.
Messaging filters to select groups as recipients.
Member detail pages that displayed group membership and provided simple controls to edit or add members.
Multiple entry points to add members (from messages, DMs, or member profiles).
Consistent interaction patterns across iOS and web.
Without this functionality, customers were forced to treat their audience as a single monolithic list. The lack of segmentation risked lower engagement and reduced the value of our platform.
Discover
This project came with some urgency: leadership wanted screens to show at an upcoming all-hands event happening that same week. The brief was straightforward: create flows for group creation, editing, keyword management, filtering, and message recipients.
To start, I quickly assembled the existing pages, screens, and UI components we’d be building upon. As inspiration, I audited other messaging apps with grouping functionality, screenshotting notable patterns. I also sketched concepts on paper, which gave me clarity on what to bring into wireframes.
Define
From there, I mapped the workflow in Figma as a simple flowchart. This helped me:
Visualize the customer journey from a bird’s-eye view.
Cover edge cases.
Prioritize features for MVP versus future iterations.
I also distilled design prompts that framed areas of scope for iteration. Having a place to “park” ideas that were out of scope kept me focused without losing track of future possibilities.
Design
With leadership’s deadline just days away, I prioritized creating high-fidelity mockups of key screens for the on-site presentation. Once those were delivered, I shifted into designing the full end-to-end experience.
I stayed tightly aligned with my team by regularly sharing screenshots, hosting impromptu whiteboard sessions, and reviewing flows together.
To validate the designs, I built an interactive Figma prototype (mobile web focus) and ran hallway usability tests with colleagues outside the product team. I set up two adjacent conference rooms:
Testing room: prototype on a device, screen shared to…
Observation room: PM and engineers watching via display + webcam to capture body language, demeanor, and think-aloud feedback.
These quick tests revealed consistent friction points in our interaction patterns. We made iterative refinements that ultimately smoothed the flow and prepared the feature for release.
Deliver
Final designs were organized in a structured Figma workspace, separated by platform (iOS and web) to match how work was ticketed. I included:
Full user flows for each platform.
Sections for color palettes, empty states, and responsive breakpoints.
Clear annotations for interaction details.
This structure ensured engineers could navigate the files easily and minimized back-and-forth during development.
Impact
Communities became one of the most impactful features I worked on at Community.
For customers, it solved a fundamental pain point: audience segmentation at scale. Instead of sending one-size-fits-all blasts, they could now organize subscribers into meaningful groups and deliver more targeted, resonant messages.
For the business, this was a foundational step in our product roadmap. Communities paved the way for richer audience management and future expansion, directly increasing the effectiveness of our messaging platform.
This project not only met leadership’s immediate needs for a showcase but also established a core capability that empowered customers to build stronger connections with their audiences.
Background
Community was an early-stage startup with a bold vision: to make SMS the most personal and effective communication channel between public figures and their audiences. Celebrities, creators, and brands used Community’s platform to text directly with their fans.
One of my earlier projects at Community was building a feature for managing groups of members (subscribers). We affectionately called it Communities.
At the time, the company had only launched a handful of customers onto the platform. As the sole product designer, I led the design process from concept to shipment across both iOS and our responsive web app. To deliver this, I partnered closely with a product manager and a front-end engineer from each platform.
Problem(s)
Our customers were growing fast, and managing their subscribers had quickly become overwhelming. They needed a way to organize members into meaningful groups to send targeted, relevant messages. Specifically, customers needed:
Group identifiers (name, description, color, image, emoji, created on/by).
Keyword opt-ins: where subscribers could join groups by texting specific keywords.
Messaging filters to select groups as recipients.
Member detail pages that displayed group membership and provided simple controls to edit or add members.
Multiple entry points to add members (from messages, DMs, or member profiles).
Consistent interaction patterns across iOS and web.
Without this functionality, customers were forced to treat their audience as a single monolithic list. The lack of segmentation risked lower engagement and reduced the value of our platform.
Discover
This project came with some urgency: leadership wanted screens to show at an upcoming all-hands event happening that same week. The brief was straightforward: create flows for group creation, editing, keyword management, filtering, and message recipients.
To start, I quickly assembled the existing pages, screens, and UI components we’d be building upon. As inspiration, I audited other messaging apps with grouping functionality, screenshotting notable patterns. I also sketched concepts on paper, which gave me clarity on what to bring into wireframes.
Define
From there, I mapped the workflow in Figma as a simple flowchart. This helped me:
Visualize the customer journey from a bird’s-eye view.
Cover edge cases.
Prioritize features for MVP versus future iterations.
I also distilled design prompts that framed areas of scope for iteration. Having a place to “park” ideas that were out of scope kept me focused without losing track of future possibilities.
Design
With leadership’s deadline just days away, I prioritized creating high-fidelity mockups of key screens for the on-site presentation. Once those were delivered, I shifted into designing the full end-to-end experience.
I stayed tightly aligned with my team by regularly sharing screenshots, hosting impromptu whiteboard sessions, and reviewing flows together.
To validate the designs, I built an interactive Figma prototype (mobile web focus) and ran hallway usability tests with colleagues outside the product team. I set up two adjacent conference rooms:
Testing room: prototype on a device, screen shared to…
Observation room: PM and engineers watching via display + webcam to capture body language, demeanor, and think-aloud feedback.
These quick tests revealed consistent friction points in our interaction patterns. We made iterative refinements that ultimately smoothed the flow and prepared the feature for release.
Deliver
Final designs were organized in a structured Figma workspace, separated by platform (iOS and web) to match how work was ticketed. I included:
Full user flows for each platform.
Sections for color palettes, empty states, and responsive breakpoints.
Clear annotations for interaction details.
This structure ensured engineers could navigate the files easily and minimized back-and-forth during development.
Impact
Communities became one of the most impactful features I worked on at Community.
For customers, it solved a fundamental pain point: audience segmentation at scale. Instead of sending one-size-fits-all blasts, they could now organize subscribers into meaningful groups and deliver more targeted, resonant messages.
For the business, this was a foundational step in our product roadmap. Communities paved the way for richer audience management and future expansion, directly increasing the effectiveness of our messaging platform.
This project not only met leadership’s immediate needs for a showcase but also established a core capability that empowered customers to build stronger connections with their audiences.