OurCo
Redesigning how communities vote, share, and make change.
How do you make it easy for families to help change their school community?
OurCo is a community app already live on iOS and Android, used by towns, school districts, and nonprofits to run polls and gather real feedback instead of just posting announcements. Their team came to us to audit it, since a lot of functionality had been added over time with no real UX discipline behind it. For a parent trying to weigh in on something at their kid's school, that meant a confusing sign-up before you could even see what the community was voting on, and a long list of small inconsistencies that made it feel harder to trust than it should have.
I led the UX audit and turned OurCo's sixty-plus item requirements list into something we could actually design against, complete with a working prototype for mobile and web. I also worked with a design team to create illustrations and motion pieces.
A shorter path to seeing what your school is deciding.
We rebuilt registration, onboarding, community discovery, the home feed, and profile around two things our research pointed to: let people see value before they fully sign up, and make trust visible instead of assumed. For a family trying to get involved at their kid's school, that meant a shorter registration flow with autofill and Google sign-in, an anonymous-or-public toggle on votes and comments, and communities that nest the way school districts actually do, join your school and you're automatically part of the wider district too, instead of hunting for both separately.
I worked closely with a creative director, motion designer, and brand designer, along with OurCo's team, to understand the importance of moderator permissions and umbrella communities, and how a school and its district relate to each other.
What the research found
Before designing anything, we audited nine competitors, including ParentSquare, a tool built specifically for school-to-parent communication, alongside Nextdoor, Facebook Groups, and others, to see what worked and what didn't. Most apps were good at one thing, social or community, rarely both, and ParentSquare in particular showed us how easily a school tool tips into feeling like one more inbox to check. Complicated UX is what actually gets an app deleted, not missing features, and families already juggling school and work have the least patience for it.
I used those findings, plus OurCo's own list, to build the priority order for what we'd redesign first.
Every vote counts
Phase one was four to five weeks: take OurCo from a long list of UX problems to a dev-ready Figma handoff for a separate team to build. For an app meant to make it easier for families to show up for their school community, that meant every flow had to explain itself, no one wants to read a manual before voting on their kid's school event.
I ran this as both PM and UX designer, so the requirements list stayed organized from that first document through final handoff. We delivered a complete file covering the redesigned app and a new responsive web app to match.
In the end, community engagement has reached 65% compared to the industry average of 10%.
The research basically decided the order for us. Across every app we audited, the ones people deleted weren't missing features, they were just confusing. So sign-up and trust came first, and everything else could wait. If I got a phase two, I'd put the new sign-up in front of real parents and see how many more of them vote before making an account. I'd also want to know if the anonymous toggle actually makes people more honest in the comments, or just quieter.
