Zoteria
Helping LGBTQ+ communities report hate crime and find support.
Zoteria, first called Soteria, gave LGBTQ+ communities a safer place to do two things: report hate crime confidentially, and find verified support when they needed it. We built it in partnership with Galop and Stonewall, but the bigger goal went past the app itself — to build an accurate national picture of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime, one that could inform legislation.
I joined through AKQA Leap as one of three designers, each leading a separate feature. I led Find Support, a service directory, and at the end of the project I also led the work to turn our rough, scattered components into Zoteria's first design system.
Two Lenses for Finding Help
Galop and Stonewall gave me sixty support services with no obvious link between them. There was no structure to inherit, so I had to find one. I ran card-sorting sessions with both partners and tried a few ways to group the services.
The two partners thought about support differently. One grouped it by who it serves, the other by what it provides. Neither was wrong — people reach for each depending on the moment they're in. So I kept both, but rather than two competing menus, I made one the primary way to navigate and the other a secondary filter. Harder to lay out, but it let people approach from whichever angle fit the moment.
Designing for the Worst Moment
Before designing anything, I pulled apart how directory apps work — Airbnb, LinkedIn, Meetup and the App Store among them. For each screen I noted what I saw, what I should and shouldn't borrow, and the questions I had about why the team built it that way.
The teardown surfaced ideas that shaped the feature. One in particular: the impact of a logo, which I made a requirement. Not every partner had a polished brand — some were tiny phonelines run on a shoestring — but I pushed for each to land on something. Someone might reach for this at their most fragile, and a familiar logo is an anchor in that moment. The rest of the time, it breaks up the wall of text and makes the directory easy to scan.
One Page, Many Shapes
The teardown showed me something else. That tiny phoneline might sit next to a national charity with regional offices and several programmes. Each service page had to flex across all of them.
So the detail page became modular: every block optional except a name, logo and primary description. One system, many shapes. It also meant new options could be added later without breaking the services already listed.
Tuning for Confidence and Safety
Three feature streams ran in parallel, and by the end the components from each had grown apart. For a product that needs to feel like a calm, safe place to do something hard, that's a risk. So I led the fix: pulling the scattered components and design tokens from all three streams into one design system, tuned for confidence and safety.
The result was more than consistency. The app read as safer and more sure of itself — one thing instead of three. And a new design team could pick it up and move fast.
When the Data Outlives the Product
Zoteria won BIMA Gold for Charity & Social Enterprise. That's the framed moment. The honest read is more interesting. The app has since shut down, and anyone who lands on it now gets pointed to Galop. But the goal was never just the app — it was the data: an accurate national picture of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime in the UK that could inform policy.
- 688
- 60%
- 45%
- Sexual orientation
That part worked. In 2024 the Vodafone Foundation published Hate Happens, an independent report by Dr Kevin Guyan analysing the encounters Zoteria collected. The app was the vehicle; the data was the destination. Designing something that outlives the product it came from is the work I'm proudest of here.