Announcements Reimagined: From Fragmented Actions to a Manageable System

Summary

Announcements were a high-impact but increasingly frustrating part of the product experience. Users struggled with selecting recipients, lacked visibility into who would receive messages, and had no reliable way to find announcements they’d already sent.

This project focused on improving clarity, control, and manageability across the announcements experience by:

  • Expanding recipient selection (people, places, custom groups)

  • Introducing recipient counts in the creation flow

  • Designing a centralized Announcement Hub for sent, draft, scheduled, and templated announcements

The result was a more predictable, transparent, and user-controlled workflow.

The Problem

Through feedback and internal observations, several pain points emerged:

1. Recipient Selection Was Limiting & Confusing
Users could only send announcements to a narrow set of recipients. Workarounds (manual selection, repeated steps) were common.

2. No Visibility Into Audience Size
Users often didn’t know how many people would receive an announcement until after sending, leading to mistakes and anxiety.

3. Announcements Were Hard to Find Later
If a user sent an announcement outside their current context, it could seemingly “disappear.” There was no reliable history or management view.

User sentiment:

  • “Did this send to the right people?”

  • “Why can’t I see the announcement I just sent?”

  • “I don’t trust this flow.”

My Role

As the designer responsible for announcements, I:

  • Audited the existing flows and UI patterns

  • Identified friction points in recipient selection and creation

  • Designed updates to the recipient modal

  • Introduced recipient count visibility

  • Led the design of the new Announcement Hub

Design Goals

  • Increase confidence before sending

  • Reduce errors caused by ambiguity

  • Improve flexibility in audience targeting

  • Create a predictable system for managing announcements

Section 1 – Expanding & Simplifying Recipient Selection

Challenge

The original recipient modal only supported limited selection types, making it difficult to target the right audience efficiently.

Design Approach

I redesigned the modal to support:

  • People (individual users)

  • Places (locations / groups tied to context)

  • Custom Groups (user-uploaded or defined collections)

Key improvements:

  • Clear separation between recipient types

  • Improved hierarchy and scanning

  • Reduced cognitive load when switching between selection modes

Outcome

Users gained:

  • Greater flexibility in audience targeting

  • Less need for manual workarounds

  • Faster selection workflows

My Approach

I started by auditing the existing experience and mapping out key user pain points from our research. It was clear users needed more flexibility and clarity when selecting recipients — but without adding friction or complexity to their workflow.

I explored different patterns for how users could search, filter, and select recipients across schools, classrooms, and individuals. Collaborating closely with product and engineering, I designed an experience that supported both savvy users managing large directories and teachers sending quick classroom messages. I created interactive prototypes and validated early concepts through user testing and iterated based on feedback until the flow felt intuitive, fast, and scalable.

The Design

The final design introduced a clean, unified search bar that allowed users to select any combination of recipients from across the platform — schools, classrooms, or individuals. Selected recipients appeared as visual chips, making it easy to review or remove selections at a glance. For large lists, users could filter results by role (staff, guardians, students) or context (school, grade, classroom). The design prioritized transparency, showing a summary of who would receive the message before sending, and included smart defaults and inline editing to prevent errors.

The Impact

After demoing the new addressing experience, user feedback was overwhelmingly positive. All participants in user testing rated the new flow 5/5 for ease of use and clarity. Administrators and teachers reported feeling more confident in knowing exactly who would receive their announcements, and internal support teams saw a noticeable drop in tickets related to recipient confusion. The redesign not only improved the speed and accuracy of sending announcements — it laid the foundation for future improvements like saved recipient lists and advanced audience management.

Reflection

This project was a great example of designing for real-world constraints while staying grounded in user needs. The final design I created aimed to solve long-standing pain points with clarity, flexibility, and efficiency — and user feedback during testing validated that we were moving in the right direction.

However, as we moved closer to development, a number of the proposed features — like recent lists, more advanced filtering, selecting any combination of recipients, and visual chips to show selected recipients — were ultimately deprioritized due to engineering complexity and tight timelines. While it was disappointing to see parts of the vision scaled back, I worked closely with product and engineering to ensure the most critical improvements made it into the initial release.

I’m proud of the foundation this redesign created and confident that the system is now better positioned to evolve over time. In future iterations, I’d love to revisit some of the higher-impact features that didn’t make it into MVP — particularly those that support faster workflows for repeat senders and large districts.