FQDE is an umbrella organization connecting educators, associations, and institutions across a diverse professional landscape. Its role is not only representational, but connective: facilitating communication, collaboration, and shared initiatives across groups that operate largely independently.
When this project began, there was no shared digital platform. Coordination relied on word of mouth, email chains, and disconnected tools. Information traveled unevenly, visibility was limited to immediate circles, and even basic questions like how many members were active or who was involved were difficult to answer with confidence.
I joined the project as a UX consultant working alongside an external development team. What initially appeared to be a communication challenge quickly revealed itself as a deeper structural problem.
The initial ask
The original request focused on visibility and communication.
FQDE wanted to improve how it announced decisions and initiatives, promoted and organized events, sold tickets and managed attendance, shared documents and resources, and made associations and individuals more visible to one another.
These were real needs, but they assumed something that didn’t yet exist: a shared system capable of supporting coordination at scale.
A fragmented reality
Very early on, it became clear that the ecosystem was operating without a central source of truth.
There was no reliable overview of who the members were, how many people were actively involved, which associations existed beyond one’s immediate circle, or how information flowed between groups.
Coordination depended on informal networks. Events overlapped without clear visibility. Documents were shared privately or duplicated across channels. Communication breakdowns were common, but normalized.
This wasn’t a failure of effort. It was a failure of structure.
Discovery through interviews
To understand how the system actually functioned, I conducted semi-structured interviews with institutional directors, administrators, and coordinators.
The goal was not to collect feature requests, but to uncover where people lost information, how events were discovered and planned, how overlap and conflict were handled, and what workarounds had become routine.
A consistent pattern emerged: people were spending more time managing around the system than using it. Complexity wasn’t being communicated, it was being avoided.
What shifted during discovery
Two realizations changed the direction of the project.
First, visibility wasn’t just about announcements. It was about reach. Educators wanted to discover initiatives, associations, and people beyond their immediate network, without losing sight of what mattered most to them.
Second, a single stream of information could not serve both needs. One timeline inevitably forced a compromise between relevance and openness. Too curated, and the broader ecosystem disappeared. Too global, and the signal was lost in noise.
This tension was structural.
Designing with time as a coordination tool
This is where the project’s core idea emerged.
Dual timelines for network visibility
Instead of forcing all activity into a single feed, the platform introduced two parallel timelines.
A curated timeline reflected activity from connections and relevant associations, helping users feel the pulse of their immediate network. A global timeline showed everything happening across the ecosystem, extending reach and discovery.
This was not an algorithmic compromise. It was a deliberate choice to respect two different user needs that could not be satisfied by one surface.
Event timelines as navigable systems
The same thinking extended into events themselves.
Interviews revealed persistent confusion around multi-day events with overlapping sessions. Educators missed sessions they cared about because they couldn’t make sense of the schedule. Administrators struggled to communicate complexity without overwhelming people.
Rather than treating events as static pages or linear schedules, events were designed as temporal systems.
Users could browse sessions across days, see overlaps clearly, select what mattered to them, and build a personal agenda from a larger program. The intent was simple: browse and pick, then let that become a personal schedule.
The idea required explanation, but the prototype made it legible quickly. Once people saw it in action, the value was immediately understood.
From communication tool to network infrastructure
With timelines at both the content and event level, the platform evolved beyond its original brief.
It became a shared visibility layer for associations, a discovery mechanism for people and initiatives, a coordination surface for complex, multi-day events, and a flexible system that did not force uniform behavior.
Features like document sharing and profiles supported the larger goal of making the ecosystem navigable.
Designing under institutional constraints
The project unfolded within real constraints.
There was no single internal product owner. Political sensitivities shaped what could be centralized and what needed to remain distributed. An external development team handled implementation, which meant design also served as a coordination and alignment tool.
Design decisions were evaluated not only for usability, but for their ability to build consensus and avoid unintended disruption.
Outcome and reflection
The resulting platform gave educators clearer visibility into their ecosystem and more control over how they engaged with it.
People made better attendance decisions once they could see how events unfolded over time. Engagement across associations improved as discovery extended beyond immediate circles. Administrators gained a way to communicate complexity without flattening it.
Most importantly, the platform treated coordination as the product.
This project reinforced a consistent lesson: in complex systems, clarity doesn’t come from simplifying reality. It comes from structuring it in a way people can reason about and act on.