Hello. I’m a designer and creative leader practicing my craft and leading teams to deliver government digital services. I tackle complex problems through the lens of service design.
I untangle complex problems by learning from people that benefit from, support and are impacted by systems. I work with subject matter experts to build services that help humanity and our planet. My recent work has supported The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) and the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
CMS Open Data
2020 – Current
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) has mandates to publish data in a publicly accessible way. Until recently, CMS had relied on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product to deliver on these data transparency mandates. In an effort to make future development easier, CMS is bringing these products in alignment with agency development practices. This effort requires all open data catalogs and applications to be redeveloped in DKAN.
I have supported the product team in uncovering institutional expectations and undocumented uses of the data and COTS tool. I have led efforts to document complex workflows. This effort identified core capability needs as well as opportunities to refine processes within and external to the applications we’re building. With this information, we scoped an aggressive roadmap to migrate 4 data catalogs and 5 custom applications in under a year.
Discovery for each application focuses on finding efficiencies in our new approach to designing and building and, when possible, identifying opportunities to improve the user experience of each application. Each product is being designed with its parent property’s design system.
Quality Payment Program
2017 – 2019
On the Quality Payment Program, I worked to bring clarity to a complex policy-driven program. I helped uncover and document the experience that clinicians and practice managers have interacting with complex Medicare requirements.
In this work, I led a team of UX designers, visual designers, user researchers and content writers to help analyze and craft an experience that is as clear and informative as possible. I worked directly with policy experts and the writers of federal regulation to understand the sometimes unintended impact of their carefully crafted program requirements.
This work included exercises in user research, internal workshop facilitation, information architecture, wireframing, visual design and interaction design.
Vets.gov
2016-2017
On Vets.gov I worked to build sensible and usable experiences to help Veterans access the benefits they deserve. I designed interfaces for Veterans to be able to apply for benefits.
This included deep discovery of complex business rules, formative user research with veterans who have experienced the existing systems, wireframing for proposed solutions, dissecting legalese to implement plain language alternatives, as well as usability testing to improve on our work as we went.
The visual design was crafted using 508 compliant design patterns from Vets.gov and the US Web Design Standards. New visual solutions were added when challenges arose that could not be solved with existing visual design elements.