Role:
UX / UI Designer
App Design
Team:
UX/UI Designer
Team Lead
Engagement Lead
Offshore Dev. Team
Tools:
Sketch, Figma
Adobe & Procreate
Duration:
13 Weeks
UT Austin - TxCope
Senior Product Designer 2023 - 2025
Designing a real-time overdose reporting platform to support life-saving public health responses in Texas 🚑📍
TxCOPE is a statewide digital tool developed by the Addiction Research Institute and Eviden to combat the opioid crisis through real-time overdose tracking and resource coordination.
As Product Designer, I spent nearly two years shaping the platform’s UX and UI—enabling public health teams to act faster, allocate resources more effectively, and save lives. TxCOPE played a critical role during a mass overdose event in Austin in May 2024 and continues to drive impact across Texas communities.
*This overview summarizes a complex workflow—please reach out to aaronyasko@gmail.com for more details.
1039+
Overdoses Reported
24
Outreach Orgs. Onboarded
5
Integrated Data Sources
50+
Lives Saved (In Real-Time Response)
Context
Overview
TxCOPE (Texas Collaboration on Overdose Prevention and Education) is a statewide digital platform developed by the Addiction Research Institute and Eviden to combat the opioid crisis in Texas through real-time overdose tracking, supply distribution, and resource coordination.
The platform was created to support public health officials, outreach workers, and community organizations responding to opioid-related emergencies. With growing urgency around overdose prevention, TxCOPE has already enabled over 1,000 overdose reports, integrated five critical data sources, and supported 24+ outreach organizations—saving lives during events like the May 2024 overdose spike in Austin.
My Role
As the lead UX/UI designer on this project, I contributed across a wide range of responsibilities, including:
Feature audits to assess platform gaps
User research and use case definition
Workflow mapping for organizational admin tasks
Prototyping and visual design for new features
Usability testing and post-test analysis
Final documentation and developer handoff
Visual QA and iteration alongside the dev team
I also maintained consistency across the product’s design system, building a component library and creating custom illustrations to reinforce brand identity.
Timeline
13-week sprint focused on the new Quarterly Reporting feature for organizational admins.
Project Brief
TxCOPE needed a way for organizational admins to submit quarterly reports on supply distribution and service linkages—data that was not yet captured directly from the database. The goal was to introduce a flexible, easy-to-use tool to input 11 key metrics, improving accuracy and accountability.
⚡️ The Challenge:
Design a new feature that supports manual data entry while encouraging adoption of TxCOPE’s existing tracking modules—without requiring full back-end automation (due to time and budget constraints).
Design
I worked on several core experiences, including:
Quarterly Reporting
Designed reporting tools that allowed organizational admins to track overdose activity across regions and timeframes. Reports could be exported and shared with leadership, enabling better decision-making around interventions and funding allocation.Public Health Surveillance Dashboard
Built an interactive heat map of Texas that visualized overdose incidents by county, color-coded by severity, with geolocation indicators for precise tracking. This gave public health teams a real-time, statewide view of overdose patterns to identify spikes quickly.Supply Distribution & Accessibility
Created workflows for requesting and allocating harm-reduction supplies, integrated with device location awareness to ensure organizations could identify the nearest pickup points. This improved visibility and equity in supply distribution for frontline responders.
Takeaways
Designing for constraint is part of the job. While Option 2 offered a better user experience, our team learned to prioritize MVP value within technical and budgetary limits.
Timing is everything. This tool played a critical role during a mass overdose spike, and launching quickly made real-world impact more valuable than perfection.
Revisiting decisions can unlock future value. We’ve since discussed returning to the automated reporting concept as TxCOPE enters its fifth year and cleanup phases.
“As a true testament to ‘not about us…without us’, TxCOPE offers every Texan affected by the opioid epidemic an opportunity to be a part of a solid outreach response.”
“Finally a platform we can use to better understand the needs of our communities and assists with accurate data collection on overdoses for the first time ever! Huge win for Texas outreach workers!”
“This program is going to be so vital to giving us the data we need to show that there is an actual problem in our community that needs to be addressed.”
