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 is shared below. For information about additional client projects, please reach out.
The Problem
Securing Safe Food connects allergen-free food donations from manufacturers to food pantries nationwide. They needed an efficient way to track ingress and egress donations, orders, and food requests from pantries in their partner network.
The Solution
I mapped the inherited system, rebuilt its information architecture, and designed the donation management workflows and design system across all four roles.
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 built in the workflow, and conditional logic prevents volunteers from allocating allergen-risk item to an order.
Iteration
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
→ Since this was an inherited project, defining the product terminology, outlining the IA, and creating clear guidelines for lifecycle actions needed to be completed with technical stakeholders upfront.
→ Detailed and thoughtful documentation played a huge role in the success of this project as contributors changed between semesters.
Retrospective
→ The workflow is complex, so the dashboards are dense. I'd like to test ways to show less at once, like progressive disclosure, to make onboarding easier for new volunteers.
→ Since most of my user input came through the client representative rather than volunteers directly, I would've liked to get early iterations in front of the people doing allocations.
As Director of Design, I've managed 10+ client projects like this one! Please reach out for details about other products.