Led a platform wide redesign of GoFundMe’s consumer reporting experience

Balancing Community Voice & Platform Integrity

ROLE + COMPANY + YEAR

Lead Product Designer, GoFundMe 2026

DELIVERABLES

Task Flows, Screen Flows, & Prototyping

PLATFORM + FRAMEWORK

www.gofundme.com / Heart DS

Overview

For this project, I led the design strategy to streamline GoFundMe's consumer reporting model and improve transparency and trust in the integrity process.

Goal

This initiative aims to provide a consistent, low friction way for customers to report issues directly from a fundraiser page and shift from a vague, text-heavy, high-noise system into a structured, guided experience that captures clearer, more actionable signals.

Measuring Impact

Empower Community Advocacy

  • Provide clearer, more intuitive reporting experience

  • Steer users toward actions aligned with their actual intent.

Strengthen Platform Trust

  • Surface legitimate risk earlier

  • Improves safety outcomes

Operational Efficiency

  • 50% increase in routing accuracy through structured report types and metadata architecture

  • Lays the foundation for future automation, better triage, and ML-driven integrity workflows.

  • Fraud mitigation and cost reduction

Project Challenges

Balancing Community Voice and Platform Integrity

How do we create a behavioral interface that honors both community advocacy and policy governance?

Takeaway

Empowerment with guardrails

Clear guardrails build trust and reduce misuse by providing a fair, defined path to action.

Discoverability prevents escalation

Unstructured emotion creates operational noise. Structured pathways convert it into actionable signal.

Policy Aligned Routing

Upstream UX decisions directly shape downstream operational efficiency.

Clear Intent Selection

Designing around real user intent improves both user experience and moderation accuracy.

Process

Discovery

Synthesize user research and audit current state experience on the platform today.

✦ AI Strategy

Tools used, the prompts that drove results, and how I used or edited the output to ensure quality and authenticity.

Design Principles

Developed foundational principles to ensure our goals were met

Design Framework

Defined a framework for how new workflows transform emotionally charged reactions into high-quality, policy-aligned submissions.

Design for Intent

Iterated on multiple designs for structured, policy-aligned workflows through intentional framing, guided selection, and evidence design.

Research Insights

✓

Unclear entry points, static form experience

Form Misuse & Ticket Misrouting Caused by Poor Form Discovery

✓

Fragmented & inconsistent reporting experiences across platform

Ticket Misrouting Caused by Unstructured User Input & incomplete submissions.

✓

Emotionally charged non evidence based reporting flood the system

Operational Load of Less Actionable Tickets & Repetitive Back and Forth with Users due to Lack of Upfront Info

Problem

The reporting experience lacked intent-based structure, leading to emotionally reactive, low-signal submissions that were often misaligned with policy criteria and moderation workflows. This created friction for users and inefficiencies for Safety teams.

Design Principles

⚪️

Reduce Noise, Increase Signal

Clear pathways reduce reactive behavior and improves submission quality, routing accuracy, and operational efficiency.

⚪️

Guide, Don’t Police

Use framing, selection design, and evidence prompts to gently steer users toward policy-aligned actions rather than blocking them outright.

⚪️

Discoverability

Surface relevant guidance and alternative pathways at the point of friction to reduce false positives and better route issues before escalation.

Design Framework

Converting Emotion into Structured Signal

The experience transforms emotionally charged reactions into high-quality, policy-aligned submissions through structured intent pathways and contextual guidance.

Design for Intent

Transformed emotionally reactive reporting into structured, policy-aligned signal through intentional framing, guided selection, and evidence design.

1 / Discoverability

Surface relevant guidance and alternative pathways at the point of friction

Reduce false positives and better route issues before escalation:

  • In page nudges

  • Dynamic logic

  • Alternative pathways

UX Scenarios

Unified entry point for varied community concerns

  • Concerned supporters

  • Fraud reporters

  • Refund seekers

  • Beneficiaries owed funds

  • People who simply disagree

  • Safety teams reviewing cases

  • Ops teams routing issues

2 / Emotional Reaction

De-escalate emotionally charged situations with clear expectations

Leverage framing, intent-based selection, and evidence guidance to convert reactive reporting into policy-aligned signal. Providing clear pathways and a controlled outlet for context reduces low-signal submissions and minimizes unsupported claims

Guide users through pathways that respect their perspective while aligning with policy criteria

3 / Intent Framing + Structured Selection

Built around intent as its core structural layer.

Instead of relying on open-ended narrative, the flow presents clearly defined pathways mapped to policy categories, user behavior patterns, and moderation workflows.

4 / Evidence Guidance + Policy Aligned Signal

Designing for actionable input

Evidence guidance serves to:

  • Sets expectations for what can be reviewed

  • Increase the precision and efficiency of downstream moderation

Summary

This experience was designed around the tension between emotion and policy. Rather than treating reporting as a simple form submission, the solution applies intent-based framing, structured pathways, and contextual guidance to transform emotionally charged reactions into clear, policy-aligned signal. By validating user concerns while introducing guardrails and proactive discovery, the design improves submission quality, reduces false positives, and strengthens trust across the platform.