Harmonizing multi-product UX across 50+ CMS platforms
As the director of the Human-Centered Design (HCD) Center of Excellence, I led UX strategy across a fragmented ecosystem of health IT tools and platforms (e.g., aligned 180 contracts across CMS) to produce a unified design system and seamless user experience for multiple personas (beneficiaries, clinicians, admins).
Challenge
Business Need:
- Needed a unified strategy to modernize interfaces and services while containing costs and ensuring compliance.
- Required consistent alignment of product design with agency goals, data interoperability standards, accessibility mandates, and public trust.
- Lacked scalable design governance, UX measurement frameworks, and design-system continuity across teams.
User Pain Points:
- Users faced inconsistent interfaces, duplicative data entry, confusing navigation, and limited accessibility support.
- Common tasks (applications, eligibility checks, data reconciliation) required relearning multiple systems, reducing confidence and efficiency.
- Internal teams lacked centralized UX standards and research sharing, causing rework, duplication, and slower delivery.
- Disjointed experiences weakened trust in CMS’s modernization efforts and hindered end-to-end service transformation.
Approach
To address the fragmented platform experience across CMS’s expansive product ecosystem, I led a multi-pronged strategy grounded in cross-functional alignment, scalable education, and repeatable systems.
Streamlining onboarding & training for employees & contractors
Together, with a team, I developed a tailored employee and contractor onboarding experience focused on accelerating alignment with CMS’s human-centered design (HCD) and accessibility goals. We co-created and delivered 10+ courses to 1500+ CMS employees and contractors.
Promoting the design system as a shared language
I served as a key champion of CMS’s enterprise design system, embedding its use into project lifecycles, and shifting it from a passive reference to an active, collaborative resource, and exploring new tools (e.g., Knapsack, Storybook) to better connect design and code.
In addition, I embedded HCD liaisons into Agile product teams to ensure UX alignment during backlog grooming, PI planning, and release validation and facilitated recurring roundtables with HCD teams.
Curating a cross-product persona and journey library
Recognizing the reality that the same users interfaced with CMS along multiple touchpoints, I led the creation of a centralized repository of user personas and end-to-end journeys that reflected real-world navigation across multiple CMS systems.
In addition, the Center of Excellence team I led provided guidance by creating playbooks and documenting enterprise best practices for the Center to follow.
Outcomes
There was a reduction in UX inconsistencies, alignment across data standards adoption, enterprise-wide design system adoption, rework savings, and overall a culture that embraced user-centered design.
25%
faster onboarding via shared design patterns, tools, and documentation—reducing ramp-up time and support needs.
20%
reduction in UX debt via design system adoption, cutting rework and accelerating feature delivery.
1500
employees and contractors complete training to champion design thinking approaches towards their work.
Selected Works
(240) 455-4586 ● design@faymail.com
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