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Sprint partners

A Huge-led IMPACT sprint in Atlanta, with survivor advocates, law enforcement, legal aid, recovery organizations, and global mission-driven partners.

  • TechBridgeTechBridge
  • Wellspring LivingWellspring Living
  • youthSparkyouthSpark
  • Unsilenced ATLUnsilenced ATL
  • Sun GateSun Gate
  • City of Atlanta Police DepartmentAtlanta Police Department
  • Federal Bureau of InvestigationFBI
  • Civil Lawyers Against World Sex-Slavery (CLAWS)CLAWS
  • The Carter CenterThe Carter Center

Agency · Social Impact

Social Impact · Agency

Building Social Impact Into a Global Design Agency

Role
Interaction Designer. Sprint Master and Research Lead
Team
Huge x Partners: TechBridge, Wellspring Living, youthSpark, Unsilenced ATL, Sun Gate, Atlanta Police Department, FBI, CLAWS, The Carter Center
Timeline
2015 to 2018
Platform
New York and Atlanta

Designed a mentorship product for survivors of sex trafficking by bringing together experts from the community including a survivor of sex trafficking, The FBI and the Carter Centre as representatives. The sprint model inspired a global hackathon.

Beam app prototype walkthrough cycling through four screens: Find a mentor, Profile and progress, Goal tracking, and Resources.
Beam prototype walkthrough, cycling through core screens from mentor selection to profile, goals, and resources.
01TL;DR
The bet

This project started with me knocking on a director's door who took a chance on me to launch the first-ever Huge IMPACT sprint, a social-impact initiative that grew into a company-wide program. At Huge, a global creative company, I led UX research and interaction design for major clients including Google, UPS, and Medicare and Medicaid, driving product transformation through usability testing, research, wireframing, and prototyping.

What I did

Sex trafficking is one of the world's largest criminal enterprises, and Atlanta is a hub for it. I believed our team could help, so I pitched the idea to leadership (who later became the company's CEOs), rallied colleagues to volunteer, and brought in external partners including survivor advocates and the Carter Center.

The impact

I ran the sprint in Atlanta, where the team designed Beam, a mentorship and resources product for survivors. The effort later grew into a larger social-impact hackathon.

Beam 2.0 demoLIVE DEMO - SHIPPED

Beam was an IMPACT-sprint project I worked on at Huge, a prototype walkthrough captured on iPhone, shown here in its original form.

02Challenge
Huge IMPACT workshop room: a long table of designers, researchers, advocates, and a survivor leader collaborating on sticky-note walls, with the framing question 'How might we facilitate the recovery transition of a survivor?' overlaid.
The Challenge: How might we facilitate the recovery transition of a survivor?
Whiteboard close-up: 'How might we...' framing with two prompts — raise awareness around sex trafficking, and facilitate the recovery transition — each broken down by who, why, and end goal.
Framing the problem: the team broke each 'How might we' into who it serves, why it matters, and what the end goal looks like.

Sex trafficking is a vast, largely invisible industry, and Atlanta's tourism and airport traffic make it a center for it. Survivors face barriers at every stage of reintegration, from finding shelter and counseling to rebuilding everyday skills and human connection.

The hard truth the work surfaced: survivors are rarely in the room when solutions for them get designed. Global brands came to Huge needing real product transformation, not just a fresh coat of paint: experiences that were measurably more usable and more engaging, grounded in evidence.

And internally, there was an opportunity I cared about to make social impact a real part of how a commercial agency spent its talent.

Keisha Head, activist, advocate, motivational speaker, and survivor of domestic child sex trafficking, addressing a Huge audience as a keynote speaker.FBI Victim Specialist Amanda Gulli giving a keynote talk to a packed room of Huge employees, with her name projected on screen.
Setting the stage with keynote speakers. Employees heard from FBI Victim Specialist Amanda Gulli and Keisha Head, advocate and survivor, who kicked off the event. They educated the team about sex trafficking in Atlanta, the USA, and worldwide, and where technology and design can play a role in helping to solve it.

We invited subject matter experts (SMEs), including representatives from nonprofits focused on sex trafficking, members of law enforcement, and survivors, to collaborate with the Huge team. The experts were from the FBI, The Carter Center, Care USA, Wellspring Living, Sun Gate Foundation, YouthSpark, Unsilenced ATL, Montgomery County Police Department, and TechBridge. They helped the team figure out which specific problem they should focus on, balancing the needs of the community with the limitations of technology and time.

“It is very important for me to have a voice, to let the world know this happened to me and people can overcome human trafficking. A lot of times survivors are not at the table when it comes to implementing and creating things. I think that Huge went above and beyond for survivor leadership by incorporating a survivor voice. That is very empowering.”
— Head, Survivor leader, Beam project
03THE SPRINT AND THE RESEARCH

The Sprint and the Research

Prototype exploration in a week

Sample work from Huge IMPACT: wireframes for Onboarding, Village, Profile, and Contact screens, plus a 24/7 chat bot concept and Beam app and chat bot integration screens.
From concept to development: sketching wireframes to designs, our team created the Beam chat bot for survivors.
A Huge researcher interviewing a participant one-on-one, both seated with a laptop on the table between them.Small-group discussion during the sprint: a subject-matter expert speaking with a team of designers seated around a table, whiteboard notes about users, why, and end goal visible at left.A participant adds sticky notes to a synthesis wall organized by Awareness, Education, Intervention, Location, and Resources.
Inside the sprint: one-on-one expert interviews, small-group sense-making with advocates and survivor leaders, and synthesis walls clustering insights into Awareness, Education, Intervention, and Resources.
“Survivors who exit the life struggle to access services that recognize their unique trauma.”
— Amanda Gulli, FBI victim specialist

The sprint and the solution I designed and ran the sprint in Atlanta. Rather than try to solve all of trafficking, we focused on reintegration, the stage where survivors rebuild their lives. The team designed Beam: a product that helps survivors find shelter and counseling, learn practical skills like interviewing and managing finances, and connect with survivor mentors who have reintegrated. An incentive model rewarded real progress, for example earning a ride to a first job interview. I led UX research across client engagements, using usability testing, interviews, and data intelligence to understand where products were failing users and where the biggest opportunities sat. I started at Huge by being selected among 300+ applicants for an intensive UX program, then moved into a full-time design role. [Visual placeholder: an anonymized research artifact or a representative wireframe set, labeled.]

A Usability Finding That Redirected the Design

[Insight 1: a usability finding for a specific client that redirected the design.]

A Behavioral Pattern the Brand Had Missed

[Insight 2: a behavioral pattern the data revealed that the brand had missed.]

Process deck6 selected spreads · 45 pages total

Inside the IMPACT Sprint, Beam Process Deck

The full 45-page deck from the Combatting Sex Trafficking IMPACT sprint with the FBI and the Carter Center. Five days, one war room, from problem framing to the Beam prototype.

Download PDF
04IMPACT

The Impact

IMPACT

Huge IMPACT Sprint , from Atlanta to Global Hackathon

The first social-impact sprint at Huge, run in partnership with mission-driven organizations including the FBI and the Carter Center. The shareable artifact, and the one that grew into a company-wide program.

“The opportunity is too big, and the purpose is too important for this to end with a prototype and presentation. We are working with various organizations and foundations, as well as the participating stakeholders, to complete and establish BEAM as a platform for change, and hopefully break the cycle of sex trafficking in our community and around the world.”
— Michael Koziol, Huge
05The Impact

Outcomes

The team produced and presented the Beam prototype, with the expert panel and advocates aligned behind it. The deeper outcome was the model itself: I showed that originating a mission-driven project from the ground up, with the right people in the room, was possible inside the company. It seeded a larger social-impact hackathon that followed.

  • Created a final demonstration to partners to continue the work together and understand potential.
  • Launched Huge IMPACT, which grew into a company-wide hackathon and an ongoing social-impact program.

Next project

Improving UPS Shipping and Tracking for Better Customer Service