Summary
Designing a streamlined solution to help incarcerated learners track their progress and create structured parole portfolios.
Incarcerated individuals seeking parole must present a portfolio demonstrating their rehabilitative progress, but without clear guidance, their submissions are often incomplete or disorganized.
To address this, my team and I designed a dashboard for tracking progress and automatically generated reports that simplify parole preparation. These tools ensure that rehabilitative efforts are documented in a structured, easily accessible format, improving both the resident experience and the parole board’s assessment process.
A dashboard that motivates residents while tracking their rehabilitative progress.
Printable reports that summarize their progress across programs.
Jump to solution
Context & The Problem
Unlocked Labs builds educational technology to support incarcerated learners, but a large challenge remains when preparing them for parole.
Unlocked Labs is dedicated to developing 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, a critical gap remains—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 team came in.
Our Challenge
How might we support residents to track and showcase their accomplishments in correctional programs?
Research
We familiarized ourselves with the parole process and conducted 2 user/stakeholder interviews.
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.
Eligible federal prisoners can earn 10 to 15 days of time credits for every 30 days of successful participation in approved programs and productive activities. These earned credits can accelerate their transition to a halfway house, home confinement, or probation.
Since each state has its own parole policies, we decided to focus on only one state (Missouri) for a more in-depth and impactful analysis.
Building on our secondary research, we conducted two user interviews that doubled as stakeholder interviews with two members of Unlocked Labs who had firsthand experience with incarceration and the parole process.
I led both of our interviews over Zoom.
Both members were able to walk us through their portfolio. Our research were 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. Without formal guidance, the previous resident had no clear direction on how to present this information effectively to the parole board. This portfolio became 188 pages long.
Additionally, we learned how UnlockEd categorizes its programs and courses in accordance to state parole guidelines.
Research Insights
Without a clear structure, residents often struggle with what to include, leading to incomplete or disorganized submissions.
Quotes from our user interviews
Overall, we found that:
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 keep track of course completions, in some cases relying on handwritten notes. However, federal prison rules may dictate what items residents can keep in their cells, leading residents to hide years of records. Documentation is also scattered across programs, making it even more difficult to present a clear portfolio for parole consideration.
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, 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
We met bi-weekly as a team and weekly with the CTO of Unlocked Labs, eventually progressing from low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity prototypes that we tested on the same 2 stakeholders who had experience in the incarceration system.
We began our initial brainstorming with limited knowledge, as we had not yet received all resources from our client, but we needed to move forward.
We quickly moved into low-fidelity wireframes to paint a better picture for our client. At this time, we were still brainstorming what we could add to this dashboard.
After speaking with the CTO, we gained clarity on existing resident resources, some hidden within UnlockEd. Since external courses redirect users to separate dashboards, features like a class calendar felt redundant.
With this improved understanding, we moved into designing mid-fidelity wireframes, refining our approach to the dashboard layout. To improve usability, we considered splitting the dashboard into two separate pages, ensuring a clearer and more organized overview.
We ultimately decided to keep everything on a single page but separated the certificates table into its own widget for better visibility.
At this stage, our user testing revealed key refinements:
Terminology needed adjustments ("Experiences" was unclear), and units and credits should be standardized.
Users valued tracking completed and ongoing courses, even those without certificates.
They also wanted clearer hour 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.
We went through one more round of design iteration before finalizing the dashboard.
Design Decision
We prioritized high-level data that summarizes information across programs.
UnlockEd already does show residents an overview of the hours they have logged each day over the past year against the courses they are taking.
Existing progress summary showing courses in the past year
For our initial screens, we included details about residents' courses as a mean of creating another dynamic, motivating, day-to-day activity dashboard.
However, when we tested these screens, we discovered that the resident's long-term progress could not be effectively communicated by courses alone.
As a result, we decided to zoom out from individual courses to resident programs, showing a higher-level view of the long-term progress a resident is making towards their rehabilitation goals. This encouraged us to include the Time Allocation chart, so that users can view a visual breakdown of their long-term activity and decide whether it aligns with the goals they've set out in their case for parole.
Final Solution
Our first deliverable was a dashboard centralizing the users' needs.
Residents can also download reports summarizing their progress and achievements.
As an add-on, we also wanted to present 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.
Impact
This dashboard will be launched in 2025 Q2 and reach 500+ correctional facility residents!
Wishes
More user interviews and user testing.
Due to our tight timeline, no access to interviewees, and lack of experience with incarcerated individuals, we opted not to try and source interviewees for us to conduct user interviews. Instead, we relied on insights from Unlocked Labs' founders, who were previously incarcerated themselves.
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.
Learnings
A design process isn't always linear when starting out.
We adopted a parallel process—making 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)!
That's me presenting this project to our class!
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.
Interested to know more about this project? Email me at monicacortes@berkeley,edu
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