Unlocked Labs
Supporting incarcerated learners preparing for parole
Timeline
2 months
Project Type
Contract
Role
Product Designer
Tools
Figma
overview
Incarcerated individuals need help tracking their rehabilitative progress in order to create structured parole portfolios.
Residents must present a portfolio when seeking parole, but without clear guidance, their submissions are often incomplete or disorganized. As part of Berkeley's Product Design Studio course, I worked with a group of graduate students and the Unlocked Labs team.
Solution
Parole preparation is simplified through a dashboard made to track progress and generated physical reports.
Both tools ensure that rehabilitative efforts are documented in a structured, easily accessible format, improving both the resident's online experience and the parole board’s in-person assessment process.
A dashboard that motivates residents while tracking their rehabilitative progress.
Printable reports that summarize their progress across programs.
impact
This project launched in 2025 Q2 to reach 500+ correctional facility residents.
But how did I get here?
what is unlocked labs?
Unlocked Labs develops educational technology solutions for incarcerated learners, helping them gain skills and prepare for reintegration.
Their product, UnlockEd, was created to address the challenges of education access and data centralization within correctional facilities.
What UnlockEd students currently see on the platform
While UnlockEd helps track program participation, students struggle to connect their engagement to their parole portfolios. Since parole eligibility depends on completing specific programs, the lack of a standardized way to document progress means much of their rehabilitative work goes unrecognized.
This is where my project team came in.
our challenge
How might we support residents to track and showcase their accomplishments in correctional programs?
Secondary Research
Given the complexity of state-by-state parole requirement differences, we focused on one state to create a targeted, effective solution.
Parole is defined as someone "serv[ing] part of their sentence under the supervision of their community." At a parole hearing, the final decision considers the offense details, criminal history, guideline criteria, correctional achievements, release plans, and potential past and future challenges.
Our team decided to focus on Missouri, as that's where Unlocked Labs is based.
user interviews
User interviews revealed specific examples of how portfolios become messy and time-consuming to complete.
To follow up that secondary research, I conducted 2 interviews with Unlocked Labs executives who had direct experience with incarceration and parole. These interviews doubled as stakeholder interviews that could inform us on any additional knowledge for this project.
Notable quotes from our user interviews
Both members were able to walk us through their portfolio. Our research was also validated by reviewing additional user interviews conducted by the original UnlockEd team.
These portfolio pages (blurred for privacy) contain a mix of typed and handwritten notes, along with screenshots and combined PDFs. This portfolio became 188 pages long.
Research Insights
Residents struggle to track scattered program records, with no clear system linking participation to criminogenic needs or parole milestones, and early solutions like UnlockEd remain limited.
Residents don't have a holistic view of their outcomes.
Currently, there's no clear structure connecting students' participation in programs to tangible milestones, ie. advancing towards parole. It's like taking random college courses without tracking graduation requirements.
Tracking documents can be messy.
Residents must manually track course completions, often with handwritten notes they may have to hide due to prison rules. Records are scattered across programs, making it difficult to compile a clear portfolio for parole.
There is no formal guidance on which programs to take for parole eligibility.
There's no clear link between crimogenic needs and recommended programs. Unlocked Labs has begun addressing this by offering a variety of programs through UnlockEd, but it is still early in its solution.
The Problem: A Closer Look
Incarcerated students are left uncertain over what to include in their portfolio, putting them at risk of inadequate preparation and negatively impacting their portfolio status.
Resident’s access to UnlockEd is limited
They log progress with pen and paper
No fixed format for portfolio content
No central system for safeguarding their documents
Some learners keep backup copies of important docs
Residents share their portfolio prior to parole hearings
This contains handwritten and/or typed summaries + all supporting evidence (certificates, transcripts, etc.)
User Goals
Our primary users are incarcerated learners enrolled in UnlockEd programs.
To address their key challenges, our solution must:
Enable easy tracking of program progress
Securely store and organize documents for parole board submission
Keep learners motivated and engaged throughout their rehabilitative journey
Provide a sense of accomplishment by visualizing progress
Given the diverse backgrounds of our users, we opted for an empathy map instead of traditional personas to better capture their unique experiences and needs.
Ideation
We proposed a dashboard to encourage continue engagement in programs tailored to their individual needs and goals.
We envision a structured system that empowers residents to:
Track their rehabilitative progress,
Reach key program milestones, and
Strengthen their case for parole
At this stage, we hadn’t received all client resources but moved forward due to the short timeline, beginning our brainstorming with limited knowledge.
Initial low-fidelity sketches for the dashboard focused on showcasing a history of progress.
After speaking with the CTO, we gained clarity on existing resident resources and how they tie into UnlockEd. Since some of the courses redirect users to external websites/dashboards, features like a class calendar felt redundant.
We also focused on what users would find genuinely useful and how they could assign quantitative value to their program progress.
This round features a history of achievements, progress, and hours completed by program type. At the bottom, users can switch between current programs and past programs.
user testing
User testing highlighted the need for clearer terminology, improved tracking of any course type, more intuitive displays, and a summary view for parole review.
After speaking with both of our previous interviewees, we uncovered potential key refinements:
Terminology needed adjustments ("Experiences" was unclear), and units and credits should be standardized.
They valued tracking completed and ongoing courses, even those without certificates (outcome).
They also wanted clearer hourly correlations instead of pie charts and a summary view of both accomplishments and certifications for parole review.
From here, we moved into a high-fidelity prototype that addressed these points and now fit within the branding of UnlockEd.
Our new design features an overview of progress, time allocated by program type, certificates gained, and both on-going and completed programs.
We went through one more round of design iteration before finalizing the dashboard, to which we finalized any visual design flaws.
Final Solution
Our first deliverable was a dashboard centralizing the users' needs.
Residents can also download reports summarizing their progress and achievements.
We also presented the Unlocked Labs team with a template for their residents to print out.
Users can easily view achievements by program type and export structured reports from My Learning Documents and My Programs. These reports include program details, completion status, hours earned, and dates, eliminating the need for manual tracking so that users can focus more on making progress.
Design Decision
We prioritized high-level data that summarizes information across programs by program type.
UnlockEd already tracks daily hours, so we opted for course widgets to make the dashboard more engaging in a day-by-day basis as motivation to continue. However, user testing revealed that courses alone didn’t convey long-term progress, so we iterated upon this to instead show higher-level rehabilitation progress by program type. This led to the Time Allocation chart, which helps residents see if their activities align with parole goals and meet state program requirements.
Users can now see a breakdown of the hours put towards program type (right).
Wishes
Conducting more user interviews and user testing.
Due to our tight timeline and lack of experience with incarcerated individuals, we opted not to try and source interviewees for us to conduct user interviews. However, broader user feedback enhance inclusivity and effectiveness, given the many backgrounds of residents.
Addressing the last pain point.
We lacked time to fully address the final pain point: unclear guidance on parole-eligible programs, which vary by state and individual. With more time, we would have added a dedicated dashboard page for personalized program guidance that can indicate what's required in your state.
Learnings
A design process isn't always linear when starting out.
We adopted a parallel process, where we made informed assumptions while gathering feedback from Unlocked Labs. This accelerated our workflow and improved our user interviews, helping us ask more relevant and impactful questions.
A smaller scope doesn’t equate to lesser impact.
I often associate design solutions with creating multiple interface pages, but this project shifted my perspective. I realized that even a single, thoughtful change (in this case, designing just one dashboard page) can still lead to meaningful and impactful outcomes.
Final Mentions
Special thanks to Unlocked Labs, everyone on my team, and Jamie (my professor)!
My team and I were matched to this project for our second project in the INFO 215 course (Product Design Studio).
I really enjoyed taking this class, and it really makes me excited to continue pursuing a career in product design (and possibly grad school)!
P.S. Here's another project I got to work on for this class.
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