Bridging the gap in support for
incarcerated individuals nationwide.
What does an incarcerated individual do when they are sexually abused in prison?
These stories are real, and they're frighteningly common. Countless go untold, because staying quiet is often the only rational choice when the person who wronged you is the same person who controls your daily life.
Just Detention International (JDI) asked me to design a tool that could help.
Project Highlights
More Overview
Working with Just Detention International as the sole designer
Just Detention International (JDI) is a nonprofit organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.
The app was approved by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for piloting with 5,000+ incarcerated individuals. Deployment is currently on hold pending a hardware contract resolution with California facilities.
The Challenges
Prison tech is nothing like consumer tech.
Research
What challenges do incarcerated individuals face when seeking support?
Usability Testing
Insights from users
39% (7) of testers voiced concerns over navigating to resume reading (due to session constraint).
My nav only included high-level headings. I manually divided new subsections to increase nav granularity.
72% (13) of testers couldn't find a specific resource using filters alone.
Developers had initially ruled out search for technical reasons. I used this data to advocate for its inclusion. Search made it in the final build.
Some layout stuff
Digitizing analog resources with familiar digital language.
Starting from JDI's traditional materials.
I hand-sorted 100s of various files into three categories seen in Figure 1.2 to address both legal compliance and the needs of two distinct user groups: those in crisis and those healing/exploring.
Decisions
Balancing legal compliance & technical constraints with sensitive users meant making informed iterations.
Decision #1: Granular booklet navigation without saved user sessions
Decision #2: Break up dense video
PREA created one long, dense video. I cut it up into 16 subsections and created a YouTube-like catalog.
Decision #3: Detailed Help Resources navigation
Decision #4: Always opt for clarity (language toggle)
Visual cues can have cultural implications. Thoughtfulness avoids unnecessary confusion.
Final Designs
An accessible hub for urgent info & education.
In retrospect
Navigating bureaucracy in a sensitive space
No single design problem was as challenging as maintaining scope as a sole designer. This was exacerbated by sensitive user needs and a space with heavy red tape, where compliance and approval means everything.
Designing an unprecedented tablet app taught me to balance design intuition with evidence-backed research. I learned to create familiarity through thinking about why things work in other interfaces.
I learned design advocacy is a skill and not to be taken lightly. I faced pushback with search from my project lead, but I backed my requests with usability testing as validation, leading to its implementation in the final product.
The app was approved by the CDCR and built. Deployment to 5,000+ incarcerated individuals is on hold pending a hardware contract resolution, which is outside anyone's control at the moment. What exists is a rigorously tested, compliance-approved product waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.