Code4Community
Code4Community (C4C) is a student-run organization at Northeastern that builds and maintains software for nonprofits at no cost.
2025 – Present
Director of Design
Product Design, Design Leadership
15 Designers / 6 concurrent projects
As Director of Design, I oversee and manage all client projects for a given semester. One client project that I had direct design involvement in (Securing Safe Food) is shared below for context.
The Problem
Securing Safe Food connects allergen-free food donations from manufacturers to food pantries across the country. They needed an efficient way to track ingress and egress donations, food orders, and requests from pantries in their partner network.
The Solution
I built the donation management system through several rounds of iteration, building the project design system and wireframes, while running design for the rest of the studio at the same time.
Key Design Decisions
→ A mishandled item can send someone to the hospital. The unsafe path needed intentional friction. Allergen separation lives in the visual hierarchy, safety checks are unavoidable in the workflow, and volunteers only ever see the manufacturers stocking the specific allergen-safe item that's been requested.
→ Inherited & rearchitected. The embedded relationship between orders, donations, and requests across four user roles required a UI that is consistent and retraceable across isolated dashboards. The design system had to support clarity as a primary value.
→ Documentation under the hood. Every item moves through manufacturers, volunteers, and pantries, and when something goes wrong, it has to be traced backwards. A paper trail is built underneath the flow of donation stock for administrative ease.
Iteration
Sorry! Some of this work is proprietary. Please reach out for further details
Outcomes
Took Securing Safe Food from an undocumented handoff to a shipped system across four user roles, owning the client relationship, product, IA, and design system.
Takeaways
→ On a messy inherited project, the first thing worth delivering wasn't polished visuals, but rather a clear picture of how the whole system works.
→ Setting up the systems that let every other designer do good work allowed for agile systems to thrive.
Retrospective
→ Detailed and thoughtful documentation played a huge role in the success of this project as contributors changed between semesters.
→ The complexity of the workflow means that information density is high. Condensing the amount of information shown at once could lead to easier onboarding.