Icon was a startup venture focused on helping organizations create private digital communities where members could connect through messaging, events, and subscriptions.
As Lead Product Designer, I led product strategy, information architecture, UX, UI, and the design system from concept through investor-ready MVP.
Rather than separating onboarding, conversations, events, memberships, and announcements into disconnected tools, Icon brings every interaction together inside one cohesive community experience.
Start with belonging.
New members arrive to personalized announcements, a welcome video, guidelines, and quick links. Orientation happens inside the product, so the first session answers where you are and how to take part.
Everything happening in one place.
Announcements, recent activity, featured conversations, and upcoming events share one destination. Members start every visit from the same surface instead of switching tools to reconstruct context.
Conversations with context.
Public, private, and secret groups let communities organize themselves, and every conversation stays attached to the group that created it—carrying membership, permissions, and history with it.
Participate beyond the conversation.
Live video sessions and in-person gatherings are discovered, joined, and managed in-platform. Participation follows the same membership rules as everything else, so access never needs a second system.
Built for communities that grow.
Memberships, subscriptions, roles, and moderation controls sit together. Organizations can scale participation while keeping structure, privacy, and trust intact as the community changes.
The challenge wasn't designing another messaging application. Organizations — from universities and athletic programs to brands and gig-worker networks — needed flexible community spaces with different permissions, memberships, privacy settings, and communication models.
Public, private, and secret communities plus nested groups all had to coexist inside a single, coherent product model.
Direct messaging, group conversations, live events, and in-person events each carried different expectations for presence, notification, and permission.
Subscription-based memberships and flexible permissions had to feel native to the community rather than bolted onto it.
The goal was making all of this feel intuitive — powerful for administrators without overwhelming everyday members.
Before designing a single screen, we mapped how organizations were already running their communities — and where the seams were showing.
Organizations juggled multiple disconnected tools for messaging, events, announcements, and memberships.
Fragmentation created complexity for administrators long before it reached members.
Different organizations needed different privacy, permission, and membership models from the same product.
The product structure moved through four information architecture iterations — from separate destinations for messaging, events, and memberships to one community spine carrying groups, chats, events, and subscriptions.
The home experience became the foundation of the product. Members needed one place to quickly understand what was happening across their communities without constantly switching between disconnected tools.
Relevant updates appear based on the communities, groups, and events each member belongs to.
Messages, announcements, and upcoming events coexist inside one continuous experience.
Members spend less time navigating and more time participating.
Communities could create nested groups while maintaining clear navigation, visibility, and permission models.
Groups can organize around teams, classes, interests, or other community structures.
Public, private, and secret settings determine who can discover and participate in each space.
Conversations stay organized around the group and community that created them.
Direct messages and group conversations were designed to preserve context instead of existing as isolated conversations.
One-to-one conversations carry the membership context that created them.
Threads scale from a handful of members to an entire organization.
Conversations remain retrievable as communities, groups, and rosters evolve.
Members could RSVP, attend live video sessions, or join in-person events without leaving the platform.
Communities can host live video experiences directly for eligible members.
Members can discover and RSVP to physical events associated with their communities.
Event availability follows the same membership and permission logic as the rest of the platform.
To support a platform spanning communities, messaging, events, memberships, moderation, and future expansion, I designed a reusable product system that allowed new features to ship without reinventing the interface. Every screen shared the same design language, making the platform easier to scale and easier to use.
Every feature inside Icon was built from the same reusable system, allowing the MVP to expand into new community experiences without redesigning foundational UI. The result was a platform prepared to grow well beyond its initial investor release.
The final deliverable was an investor-ready MVP that brought the core Icon experience together into one cohesive platform. Rather than presenting a single feature, the prototype demonstrated how communities could communicate, organize, manage access, host events, and scale within one connected system.
Together, these systems formed the investor-ready MVP and demonstrated how Icon could grow from a single community experience into a scalable platform.
A unified activity model made a broad feature set feel like one product instead of many.
How much of the perceived complexity came from information architecture rather than interface design.
Strong information architecture often determines whether a product feels intuitive long before visual design begins.
Every case study in this portfolio began with a complex problem, an ambitious team, and a decision to build something better. If you’re solving the next one, I’d love to help.
