Center for Race & Gender at UC Berkeley

First Product Design Role

Context

In 2015, while at UC Berkeley, I joined the Center for Race & Gender (CRG) as their first product designer. CRG is an academic hub that brings together researchers, policymakers, and communities to explore issues of race, gender, and social justice.

At the time, the center was looking to modernize how research and data were shared with the broader public. Academic insights were often locked in PDFs or tucked away in small conferences, invisible to the communities they aimed to serve.

My role was to help build a digital platform that could make research accessible, collaborative, and actionable.

The Challenge

Academics generate an enormous amount of knowledge — but much of it never reaches policymakers or communities who could act on it. The CRG team wanted to solve a key question:

• How might we create a collaboration platform that connects academics, policymakers, and the public around issues of race and gender?
  

Constraints included:

• Limited resources: A small research team and no existing design function.
• Diverse stakeholders: Faculty, graduate students, policymakers, and activists all had different needs.
• Academic culture: Content was often long-form, technical, and hard for non-specialists to navigate.

My Role

This was my first professional product design role, and I dove in head-first:

• Research & Discovery – Conducted stakeholder interviews with academics and community partners.
• Information Architecture – Helped organize large volumes of research into digestible categories.
• UX Design – Designed the first flows for uploading, browsing, and sharing research outputs.
• Prototyping & Testing – Built early clickable prototypes for feedback sessions with faculty and students.
• Design Implementation – Worked alongside engineers to translate research into a functioning platform.

The Solution

The result was CRG’s first-ever digital collaboration platform.

Key elements included:

• Research Repository: A centralized place to publish, search, and browse academic work.
• Collaboration Features: Tools for academics to connect and share data across projects.
• Policy Translation: Summaries designed to make research findings legible for policymakers.
  

While modest in scope, the platform represented a step-change for how CRG engaged with the world. Instead of siloed research, there was now an accessible hub for collaboration.

Impact

• Accessibility: Research once buried in PDFs became searchable and shareable.
• Collaboration: Faculty and graduate students could more easily connect across disciplines.
• Policy Influence: Policymakers gained a clearer window into academic findings.
• Personal Growth: For me, it was the project that introduced the craft and responsibility of product design.

Reflection

Looking back, this project was foundational. It taught me that design is not just about usability — it’s about connecting people to knowledge and power.

At the Center for Race & Gender, I learned how to:

• Listen deeply to users with very different needs.
• Translate complexity into clarity.
• Build with limited resources while aiming for impact.
  

This experience set the trajectory for my career. From that first platform, I went on to design products in immigration, education, fintech, and beyond — always carrying forward the lesson that design can change how people access opportunity.