Project Overview
Client: Trans Lifeline · Timeline: Feb–Sep 2024 · Role: Lead Product Designer
Team: UXR, Hotline Operations, 8 engineers
Over the span of 4 months I led product design for Trans Lifeline—a 12-year-old grassroots peer support hotline—from February through September 2024. They were running on 10+ year old abandoned open-source software: voice-only, poor mobile experience, bring your own device chaos, and a tagging system so fragmented (200+ tags across 20 categories) that wrap-up alone could eat two minutes per call. Only about 15 operators could be supported at once. The challenge we were faced with was:
How might we modernize this critical platform while keeping its grassroots, peer-support values and reaching more people in crisis?
The Challenge
Operators needed to toggle status in tiny drawers and couldn't hyperlink resources from the dashboard—callers had to copy-paste URLs by hand. Data collection was labour-intensive and overwhelming. Security was under pressure. And the community was asking for chat and SMS, not just voice. We had to fix the operator experience first so the organization could scale without burning people out.
