Designing for the underserved: Unifying Pigeonly's digital experience

Project Overview

Role: Head of UX & Design (2015–2022)

As the sole designer at Pigeonly, I led end-to-end design across all digital platforms, including web, mobile, and internal tools. I also maintained the company’s visual identity across social media, email, and marketing channels. My primary focus was unifying fragmented services—phone, photos, and money transfers—into a single user dashboard that simplified communication for families with incarcerated loved ones.

Problem & Context

Pigeonly served a deeply underserved demographic: families navigating the complexities of communicating with incarcerated loved ones. The digital experience was fragmented—each service (e.g., sending photos, adding funds, making calls) lived on separate pages with inconsistent branding and confusing UX. Internally, there was no design system in place, and legacy development practices created friction for collaboration.

Actions & Approach

• Unified product ecosystem: Consolidated siloed services into a single dashboard, enabling faster, more intuitive task completion.

• Material Design systemization: Implemented consistent UI across all platforms using Material Design components, reducing cognitive load for users.

• Templated design approach: Created reusable patterns and layouts for marketing, dev handoff, and internal tooling—resulting in faster launches and reduced design debt.

• Evangelized UX principles: Advocated for clarity and accessibility with the mantra “Make it easy enough for the CEO’s grandma to use.”

• Facilitated dev/design collaboration: Reviewed MRs, defined shared standards, and pushed to establish a formal design system despite initial dev resistance.

Challenges

• Dev pushback: Developers were initially resistant to adopting a design system due to legacy code. I handled this by demonstrating long-term cost savings and delivery speed improvements.

• Lack of research infrastructure: Without formal UX research, I relied on prior survey data and support tickets to infer user needs and pain points.

• Scaling solo: As a solo designer, I wore multiple hats—from UX/UI to marketing design and dev enablement—requiring extreme prioritization and cross-functional alignment.

Outcomes & Business Impact

• 10,000+ monthly users benefited from a vastly simplified product experience.

• Reduced launch times through reusable templates and consistent components.

• Increased conversions via consistent branding and optimized email/social templates.

• Cost savings by avoiding the need to hire additional designers.

• Internal efficiency and dev handoff speed increased through a templated approach.

Lessons Learned

• A design system is not just about components—it’s about how people work together.

• You don’t need a full team to start doing the right thing—you just need buy-in, clarity, and grit.

• Bridging gaps between disciplines requires patience, humor, and persistent clarity.

Teachable Takeaway

Find the patterns in people’s pain. Build for the humans behind the system first. Whether it’s the family member on the outside or the developer on the inside—everyone benefits from clarity, consistency, and empathy.