Ring Neighbors App

Design a simple, trustworthy platform that allows homeowners to receive and share real-time, hyperlocal safety information. Success meant fast comprehension, easy navigation, and confidence in both the content and the community.

Product Designer responsible for end-to-end UX and UI design, onboarding strategy, information architecture, qualitative testing, stakeholder alignment, and collaboration with Trust & Safety and Legal teams.

Primary users were older homeowners focused on property security. They relied on local news, valued clarity over features, and were often familiar with neighborhood social platforms like Nextdoor. The experience needed to feel familiar, calm, and easy to understand.

Safety information must feel calm and credible to be useful. If users feel confused or overwhelmed, trust is lost.

Neighbors was designed as a community-driven safety feed that combines local updates, Ring video clips, and information from public safety agencies. The experience centered around a newsfeed that surfaced relevant activity near the user’s home, supported by commenting and a map view for spatial context. The design emphasized clarity, visual storytelling, and responsible community participation.

Trust before engagement. Clarity over density. Familiar patterns reduce friction. Community with guardrails.

To align early with stakeholders, I created a benefits-focused onboarding flow using existing illustrations. This allowed the team to validate the concept and value proposition quickly before committing to detailed UI work. Rapid alignment enabled faster iteration while keeping the team focused on delivering core value.

A foundational information architecture was developed to define the app’s primary surfaces and launch features. The main challenge was navigation. The newsfeed was the primary experience, but users also needed quick access to maps and additional safety details. Due to development constraints that prevented a bottom navigation bar, I designed a top slider navigation that balanced ease of implementation with user clarity.

Preference tests and five-second tests compared icon-based tiles to illustrative tiles. Users consistently gravitated toward the illustrative designs, perceiving them as more engaging and easier to understand. Content cards adopted familiar news and social patterns to support users with varying levels of technical proficiency.

Once the feed and card designs were established, I worked closely with the Trust & Safety team to define posting guidelines. Designs were reviewed with Legal to ensure compliance across categories before broader user testing. This collaboration ensured community participation remained constructive and aligned with Ring’s standards.

Full prototypes of the primary experience were tested with Ring users via UserTesting.com. Feedback revealed confusion around incident categories and proximity. UI refinements improved visibility of distance from the user’s home and clarified categorization, increasing confidence in the information presented.

The Neighbors app scaled rapidly, reaching over 20 million monthly active users. It established partnerships with public safety agencies and earned a five-star rating with more than 262,000 reviews. Due to its success, Neighbors evolved from a standalone app into a core feature integrated directly into the primary Ring device management app.

Designing trust-centered community platforms. Balancing safety, usability, and moderation. Designing for non-social-media-native users. Navigating legal, trust, and technical constraints.

As connected devices become more embedded in daily life, the challenge is not access to data, but responsible interpretation and delivery. Neighbors demonstrates how thoughtful design can turn real-time information into a trusted, community-scale safety resource.