For the past six years, I've designed digital products and platforms across civic tech, creative and highly technical tools, and media organizations. Much of my work is under NDA, but I can share a glimpse of my contributions here. For greater detail, please email me to review a PDF (zoe@zoe-cooper.com).

I focus on user research, data visualization, information architecture, B2B/SaaS product design, accessibility (WCAG 2.1), and design systems. I've led design teams and worked closely with engineers on complex technical workflows and admin interfaces.

Tools: Figma, design research tools (blueprints), Adobe Suite, Origami, Unity, HTML, CSS, Processing

Lead Designer

OpenRefine, a project of Code for Science & Society

OpenRefine is an open source tool for working with messy data. Funded by Code for Science & Society and the Wikimedia Foundation, the community-driven project is geared to scientists, archivists, data journalists, and more.

I was brought on to redesign the operation history feature, transforming a complex technical workflow into an intuitive interface that enables users to better understand and modify multi-step data transformation sequences. The work involved:

  • Conducting in-depth user research with data scientists, librarians, and Wikidata contributors to understand workflows around large-scale data transformation, validation, and collaborative data cleaning

  • Leading comprehensive accessibility improvements across the platform, implementing WCAG 2.1 standards for keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and color contrast to ensure the tool was usable by researchers with diverse abilities

  • Designing accessible interaction patterns for complex data grid interfaces, ensuring keyboard-only users could efficiently navigate and edit large datasets with clear focus indicators and logical tab order

  • Creating high fidelity prototypes in Figma and iterating through continuous user testing with the professional user base

  • Establishing accessibility guidelines and component specifications within the design system to ensure consistent, inclusive experiences across all features

 

Design Lead

Zetkin Foundation

Zetkin is a Sweden-based platform created to help political organizers manage campaigns, case studies, and communications internally and externally. It is used by progressive political organizers across six countries in Europe.

As Design Lead, I managed a team of two designers and one contractor, overseeing team workflow, design critiques, and communication with engineers and outreach leads to ensure alignment between design, product, and engineering. My key contributions included:

  • Designed the mass email communication system within the platform, enabling organizations to manage large-scale email campaigns to member databases with segmentation, scheduling, and tracking capabilities

  • Created admin interfaces for multi-tenant organization management, user permissions, and member database administration

  • Built data visualization dashboards for tracking campaign metrics, volunteer engagement, email performance, and organizing activity across distributed teams

  • Worked directly with customers, partners, and internal teams to balance diverse stakeholder needs while maintaining product vision

  • Led in-depth user research projects, from recruiting users to synthesizing findings, establishing design needs and priorities for the platform

  • Designed wireframes in Figma and led design critique sessions to iterate on solutions