Selecting Recipients for Large-Scale Messaging
Selecting Recipients for Large-Scale 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.
In Community’s early days, the iOS app was the main focus. Certain developments of the web app were delayed until the team had grown. One key gap in feature parity was the ability to filter members. Users would use filters when selecting recipients for a message or when browsing the Members page.
Problem(s)
The engineering team needed a filter UI for web that could:
Select recipients for an outbound message
Filter members from a list view (i.e. from Members page)
Feel consistent with the iOS experience
Be mobile responsive for our non-iPhone customers.
This was a critical feature; it was really the superpower of our platform: helping identify the right recipients for your messages.
Discover
I started with an audit of the iOS experience, framing up the flows for each filter type and its associated views. Some filters were straightforward, while others—like ranges for date, age, or location radius—required their own UI solutions.
The core design challenge was in how filter navigation would be responsive between web and mobile.
Define
I sat down with our front end web engineer and learned more about how filters worked on iOS, and if there were any major differences I might be aware of. I was also curious about future filters in development he’d been aware of. He helped me understand the displaying of counts had been a problem in the past. For a smoother experience we elected to only show one resulting count rather than a small count of members for each applied filter (too much calculating back and forth).
This was a great opportunity to brand each filter with a visual icon for added clarity, so I was thinking early about what sort of iconography we might elect for each filter type.
Design
A sidebar menu emerged as the best fit:
It provided enough space for current and future filters.
On smaller screens, it adapted to mirror the mobile-first iOS pattern, keeping the experience familiar.
Icons reinforced filter types both in the sidebar and in table cells, strengthening recognition.
This approach balanced scalability, familiarity, and ease of use.
Deliver
One highlight of this project was how smoothly it integrated into the product. By relying almost entirely on existing components, the engineering team was able to ship the new web filters UI in just two weeks. Leadership was excited to see such a critical feature land quickly and cleanly.
Impact
Filtering is a core part of the Community platform, and the new web UI made it seamless for customers to:
Target audiences more effectively
Get up and running quickly with little to no onboarding friction
Send millions of messages with confidence
Customer feedback consistently described the filters as easy and intuitive. The sidebar pattern also proved durable, later becoming the foundation for other areas like settings subpages.
This project not only unlocked a key capability for web customers but also established design patterns that continued to serve the product as it matured.
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.
In Community’s early days, the iOS app was the main focus. Certain developments of the web app were delayed until the team had grown. One key gap in feature parity was the ability to filter members. Users would use filters when selecting recipients for a message or when browsing the Members page.
Problem(s)
The engineering team needed a filter UI for web that could:
Select recipients for an outbound message
Filter members from a list view (i.e. from Members page)
Feel consistent with the iOS experience
Be mobile responsive for our non-iPhone customers.
This was a critical feature; it was really the superpower of our platform: helping identify the right recipients for your messages.
Discover
I started with an audit of the iOS experience, framing up the flows for each filter type and its associated views. Some filters were straightforward, while others—like ranges for date, age, or location radius—required their own UI solutions.
The core design challenge was in how filter navigation would be responsive between web and mobile.
Define
I sat down with our front end web engineer and learned more about how filters worked on iOS, and if there were any major differences I might be aware of. I was also curious about future filters in development he’d been aware of. He helped me understand the displaying of counts had been a problem in the past. For a smoother experience we elected to only show one resulting count rather than a small count of members for each applied filter (too much calculating back and forth).
This was a great opportunity to brand each filter with a visual icon for added clarity, so I was thinking early about what sort of iconography we might elect for each filter type.
Design
A sidebar menu emerged as the best fit:
It provided enough space for current and future filters.
On smaller screens, it adapted to mirror the mobile-first iOS pattern, keeping the experience familiar.
Icons reinforced filter types both in the sidebar and in table cells, strengthening recognition.
This approach balanced scalability, familiarity, and ease of use.
Deliver
One highlight of this project was how smoothly it integrated into the product. By relying almost entirely on existing components, the engineering team was able to ship the new web filters UI in just two weeks. Leadership was excited to see such a critical feature land quickly and cleanly.
Impact
Filtering is a core part of the Community platform, and the new web UI made it seamless for customers to:
Target audiences more effectively
Get up and running quickly with little to no onboarding friction
Send millions of messages with confidence
Customer feedback consistently described the filters as easy and intuitive. The sidebar pattern also proved durable, later becoming the foundation for other areas like settings subpages.
This project not only unlocked a key capability for web customers but also established design patterns that continued to serve the product as it matured.