From September 2023 – May 2024, I served as a co-design lead of a design studio at Ad Hoc. This studio was made up of 13-15 senior designers, half of whom I directly supervised, and they were split across seven teams serving on Healthcare.gov and Medicare.gov contacts with CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services). Ad Hoc has been a trusted partner to CMS for over ten years since its co-founders, Paul Smith & Greg Gershman, served on the task force that rescued Healthcare.gov.
As a people manager and UX leader, I led numerous initiatives related to standardizing and improving how designers advocated for their design solutioning to our client. An example of this process improvement was a deck template I co-created with my other design lead to show designers how they had prepare their design work to present to our client UX leads.
Impact
- Happier client! Our UX leads were thrilled to get information in a standardized, easy-to-scan format that they could also easily re-use in presentations to CMS administrators who didn’t have a design/UX background.
- Better use of research! Because this deck required designers to include any research they took into consideration, they started referring to research MORE and growing their knowledge of existing UX and market research created by our partners.
- More articulate design decision-making! This artifact facilitated more efficient coaching and feedback from me and my other design lead because we used it as a way to interrogate and hone designers’ design assumptions and decision-making.
- Higher-impact design work! The deck template tied design work to requirements and success metrics defined by our client and product counterparts so we could better show its impact.
View a modified/anonymized version of this design deck:
JP Wilkinson 