Strategic design initiatives

VA.gov Experimental Design

Problem: The VA.gov design system was solid, but static. Teams building on VA.gov didn’t feel they could contribute easily to the system, so it was falling behind and becoming less useful for folks.

Solution: I spearheaded an “experimental process” that allowed teams to more easily contribute components to the design system. This process is currently in use and being iterated on and improved.

“I’m really happy with how this is evolving, and I hope you know how much it is due to you and your efforts! I enjoy your partnership and collaboration… plus you made this whole experimental design thing happen really. :)” – VA client

VA.gov form system guidance

Problem: When I joined the VA.gov team, there was a form system in place team members were expected to use – however, there was no documentation out there detailing how designers were expected to use it. Instead, folks asked questions of more knowledgable people in Slack, so answers were diffuse across the Slack instance.

Solution: I gathered together all the slack messages, FAQs, and answers in a single place and published a “Getting Started with Forms on VA.gov” document for folks on my team (and anyone else needing it). I socialized the documentation and had relevant folks provide input.

Quality Payment Program Eligibility

Problem: The rules for what makes a clinician eligible to report to the Quality Payment Program are obtuse and convoluted. It seemed no one truly understood them so we were struggling to visualize these rules correctly in our online reporting tool.

Solution: I took on responsibility for fully understanding eligibility rules for clinicians and visualizing these rules in a series of flow charts and maps for our dev and design teams. Those charts ended up being some of the top accessed documents our team made, across the Quality Payment Program tech team and even outside of our company.