Designing connection, from families to facilities.

At a seed-stage startup, design needs extended across the business. I began with marketing and brand work, helping establish how Pigeonly presented itself to the families it served.

As my role expanded, I moved deeper into the product: how people found an incarcerated loved one, chose a service, and sent correspondence. I became Head of UX & Design while continuing to design the interfaces and workflows directly.

The surviving UI foundations show part of that broader practice: making recurring actions and form states consistent across the product.

Pigeonly’s consumer services had grown as separate experiences. Related tasks lived across different websites, with variations in navigation and visual language. Moving from one service to another introduced complexity for people trying to stay connected with the same loved one.

The consolidation effort brought six services into the same design conversation. I wanted to make them easier to find and use together, without making every service feel like a separate product to learn.

I interviewed existing users across the separate products and reviewed customer service recordings and feedback. I documented their journeys and pain points, then explored whether having the services in one experience would be useful.

Searching for an incarcerated loved one came up as a recurring task across the services. That gave the consolidation concept a practical starting point: a shared search experience, followed by clearer ways to enter each service.

User feedback supported the general direction. The guiding principle was “Can grandma do it?” It kept simplicity at the center of the work. After the initial concept, I collaborated with the team on story mapping.

I designed a unified consumer experience around the tasks people were already trying to complete: find their loved one, establish an account, choose a service, and create something to send.

The shared entry sequence connected search, recipient selection, account creation, and verification. For photo correspondence, I worked through upload, an optional note, and order preview. Letter creation was a separate companion workflow for composing and sending a letter.

The work also extended beyond the moment of sending. Return-address confirmation, parcel tracking, and internal account and fulfillment surfaces connected the consumer journey to the teams supporting it.

The next challenge was designing for the staff receiving and reviewing correspondence. I designed Pigeonly Corrections, a web portal for facility staff, mailroom employees, and administrators.

The workspace brought sender and recipient context together with digitized correspondence and decisions such as approve, reject, or hold. I designed the platform’s visual language, flows, and prototypes, and worked through internal testing and feedback from facilities.

This was a different environment from the consumer services. Existing technology and institutional workflows shaped what would be practical to use. A web portal let me design around those constraints while keeping the correspondence-review task clear.

Pigeonly expanded my understanding of design ownership. I moved from marketing and brand into consumer workflows, internal operations, and a platform for a different institutional audience. The work required me to connect the customer experience to the business and operational context around it.

I recall Pigeonly serving approximately 80,000 users and Pigeonly Corrections being deployed at around 30 facilities. These are approximate personal recollections, not independently verified measurements.

Alongside Pigeonly, I took on short consulting engagements through founder and accelerator networks, advising on UX/UI flows and product direction. That work reinforced a habit I carried into later roles: understand the problem, examine the journey, and work closely with the people building the product.