Hiring & Empowering Great Designers
Since its beginning, the U.S. Digital Service has recruited a wide range of expert designers to help transform the way that people can interact with their government. We have worked on 100+ impactful projects, affecting millions of people in areas that truly have life changing results.
To highlight some of our team members and the work that continues to push our mission forward, we’ve asked a few of our designers to share their previous work experience, their current projects, and what surprised them most about being a designer at USDS.
Amanda Miklik, Content Strategist (and Generalist Design Problem Solver)
Before USDS, I worked in higher education for 12 years as a Content Strategist and Instructional Designer. Like many designers, I wore many hats. I worked on multi-million dollar tech projects while providing services that helped students. Before that, I was a professional chef and baker. I’ve found more parallels than you might think between the restaurant world and the enterprise-level digital services world!
I’ve been with USDS for 8 months working on Immigration at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Our team is digitizing paper-based forms and redesigning the experience for folks applying for immigration and naturalization in the United States. As a Content Strategist, I’m constantly trying to give people what they need in the right way, at the right time, and with the least amount of pain and confusion. One way in which we hope to do this is by reducing the amount of time and effort it takes to process applications. Based on our team’s research, we’ve learned every time we need to request additional information from an applicant it adds an average of 89 days additional processing time to a case. The best way to reduce that average time is to not have to make those requests in the first place. We’ve been working on writing instructions in plain language and designing forms that are simpler and easier to fill out because they clearly define what kind of information is needed, making it less likely that the government will have to make any additional requests for information.
Suzanne Chapman, User Experience Researcher
For most of my career I have been a UX Generalist, primarily in academia at the University of Michigan and University of Illinois working on large-scale data and digital library repositories. As a UX team-of-one or manager of small UX teams within large IT organizations, I’ve had the opportunity to do it all — design, user research, information architecture, content strategy, analytics, accessibility, and product management.
In June 2016, I joined the design community with USDS at the Veterans Affairs (VA). My first project was to redesign a tool that allows Veterans to check the status of their disability claim, a process that can take an average of 7 months to several years. We did formative and summative research with Veterans to understand the frustrations and challenges inherent in this process, which informed our more streamlined user experience.
Currently, I oversee design, content, and user research as the UX Lead for Vets.gov. There are dozens of benefits Veterans could be eligible for, but it is a challenge to navigate the labyrinth of VA programs. Vets.gov is a simplified digital user experience that allows a Veteran to discover, apply for, track and manage the benefits for which s/he may be eligible. We are using a human-centered design and modern web standards to help simplify the complex process Veterans currently undergo to ensure that Veterans receive the benefits they deserve. I’m focused on better integrating accessibility throughout the process, making sure we’re using design patterns consistently, introducing UX writing earlier in the process, and expanding our research strategies to include more analytics and feedback analysis. Since becoming the UX Lead, I’ve also been working on the basics, helping to improve our team processes.
Upon joining USDS, I initially thought everyone that I was going to work with would-be Silicon Valley / start-up types but we are really a diverse group. We have a wide range of talented people from the public and private sectors which helps us solve problems in a very collaborative way. I was surprised by how similar the challenges are between higher education and government and how my years working as a team-of-one (or team-of-some) equipped me to flourish in this environment.
Jeff Barnes, User Experience Researcher
My previous job was with a government IT contractor here in DC. I spent several years consulting for the government as a UX generalist while completing my master’s degree in Human Factors Psychology. This made me want to pursue more research-driven work, and I did a lot of user testing and larger scale studies. Ultimately, I found it challenging to implement user-centered design best practices in this context and came to the USDS to help the government improve how it integrates UX research and design into digital products. I was surprised by how effectively USDS has created a modern, user needs-driven culture in the government technology space. Every team understands and implements a user-centered design approach, so UX professionals can focus much more on their work products and less on fighting for best practices on their projects.
I’ve been with the team for 10 months now and currently I’m supporting the USDS HQ team working on a website called the TechFAR Hub. Our MVP for TechFAR Hub was built over a weekend to give Contracting Officers access to the USDS Procurement team’s best practices for acquiring digital services. Right now, we are redesigning the site based on user feedback and integrating 18F’s US Web Design Standards (USWDS). The TechFAR Hub is an essential piece of the larger effort to help reform how government buys agile services, COTS products, and cloud solutions.
We took a quickly developed MVP and did user interviews, card sorting, and built a new prototype for user testing. By implementing the USWDS, we avoid many of the most common usability and accessibility pitfalls. The new version of the TechFAR Hub will better serve our target audience and provide a platform for future tools and resources for this community.
Kat Jurick, User Experience Researcher
My background started out in Industrial design, but my focus has always been on user research and strategy. In the past I have worked at Razorfish, Salesforce, and as part of the Microsoft research team worked on early versions of the Surface Pro. Before joining USDS at the very end of December 2016, I was consulting on a project about barista education for Starbucks in Seattle.
Currently my team and I are conducting a pilot project to modernize the systems that support military travel and provide a better user experience for uniformed and civilian personnel. Three million Department of Defense (DoD) employees book billions of dollars of travel each year through the Defense Travel System (DTS), but the application is old and has not kept pace with commercial best practices. When the system was created, it was unusual for a person to book travel without going through a travel agent, so it was pretty forward-thinking for its time. However, it remains largely unchanged since it was first released 20 years ago, and has been far outpaced by the websites and apps we all use to book personal travel today. The perspective of how people expect the user experience to work on a system like this has changed dramatically.
With projects of this magnitude, there are many moving parts and many different kinds of teams working on separate pieces of the whole system. It’s very easy for the end-to-end experience of the user to get lost in the shuffle, but at the same time the fastest way to understand if a new system will work is to get users on-boarded and using it as soon as possible. The difficult usability of the existing DTS has been a decades-long pain point for millions of service members and civilians. We have heard story after story about the lengths people have gone to when dealing with the current system, so we have a lot of users asking eagerly how soon they will be able to travel in a new one. With a pilot program the stakes are high — we need to be able to provide data that can show that what we are building is better. I’ve been working with one team to gather feedback on the current system, and with another team to evaluate the usability of the pilot system. The impact of incorporating user-centered design will be a huge leap forward in making routine work travel much easier and uplifting morale.
It surprised me how interested and excited people inside the DoD have been to learn about my team and what we are doing. People regularly drop by our office to talk about how we might engage with them on their projects and how we can bring our experience from the private sector into the work that they are doing here. They are often already doing great work within the system to promote change and modernization, and we can partner with them to encourage and empower that work.
Marcy Jacobs, Design Director
I was a double major in college, focusing on both visual design and psychology. I went to graduate school for a Clinical Psychology Ph.D. but became fascinated with the web and how people interacted with technology. I left grad school after completing my Master’s degree to focus on technology.
I worked briefly as a web designer but quickly recognized the need to have a different conversation -from how something looks to instead focusing on how it works and who it is designed for. I moved to a consulting company and over 10 years built a design community of practice of over 300 individuals across all design disciplines as well as engineering, management and sales.
When I joined USDS in February of 2016, I came to work as a designer on the gun background check system. When the need arose a few months later for a new design director, I was happy to step up when asked to support that role. My experience as design director at USDS has been amazing. We have such a passionate group of designers who are so focused on mission, impact and repairing systems for millions of people. As design director, I have been focused on bringing in new talent through recruiting, interviewing and assessing candidates (and we need more great people — please APPLY!!). I also support our 30+ designers in their project role and in their careers, and support agency teams to staff and execute their projects. I have been privileged in this role to support a variety of work, from scrubbing in on discovery sprints to leading an agency team across a large portfolio.
Our incredibly talented design team includes every kind of designer. We have designers with strengths across all design competencies. Through the design community of practice, we have the ability to support each other through mentoring, artifact sharing and our design buddy program where all designers are partnered with someone outside of their project.
Our primary value is research and human-centered design. We focus on challenging assumptions, thinking about core problems and pushing back on pre-defined solution by making sure design is incorporated at the beginning. The most important skills for USDS designers are to be truly user-centered, and to be able to advocate for UCD at all levels. We still need to explain how design is not a ‘make it pretty’ exercise, explain the value of incorporating research into problem definition, and have deep empathy for citizens who need services from the government.
There are endless opportunities at USDS to have major scale impact focusing on citizen facing services. We are looking for every type of type of designer — from UX strategist and user researchers to content strategy and information architecture to interaction design, front end development and visual design. We have a wide variety of projects and appreciate design problem solvers who can ideally wear more than one hat. Are you ready to apply? Enter referral code “Design”.
