Design: Challenges, Opportunities and Futures

June 27, 2024

Design serves as the key touchpoint for many CMS services, products, and policies across multiple consumer segments. It's crucial for CMS to succeed in delivering relevant, consumer-driven solutions. While design has often been labeled as merely aesthetics, over the past decade plus, it has expanded its capabilities, refined its methodologies, and honed its value proposition. This evolution has generated significant commerce through consumer relevance for many Fortune 500 companies. 

During this Community of Practice event, we focused on the design capability at CMS. We explored the challenges impacting design, the opportunities it presents, and future pathways for the many Application Development Organizations (ADOs) that deliver consumer-facing products and services for CMS. This digital design-centric panel featured User Experience (UX) leads, Human-Centered Design (HCD) experts, and Design Systems (DS) owners, who shared advice, insightful knowledge, and contextual experiences. 

This event was tailored for ADO teams, team leaders, design and research practitioners, and leadership. 

Topics we learned about: 
•    Design Systems: custom vs out-the-box 
•    Leadership/Culture 
•    ROI/Value 
•    Collaboration 
•    Role of Design & Designers 
•    Metrics & Analytics 

Session Panelists

Jeremiah Adkins  – Principal Design Lead & Senior UX Manager, iQIES. Jeremiah is a Principal UX Design Lead currently working on the Internet Quality Improvement & Evaluation System (iQIES) project for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). With a background in User Centered Design and enterprise software development, he’s supported several projects with CMS over the years. 

Sharon Chong  – UX Designer, ESS. Sharon is a UX Designer at Ventera,  where she combines her experience in graphic design and software development to support CMS’ Enterprise System and Services (ESS).

Arthur Green  – HCD/UX Lead, CCSQ Service Now. Arthur has over 12 years of experience in senior product design roles across federal and private sectors. He focuses on breaking down complex systems into easy-to-use user experiences. In lead roles, his expertise is in optimizing the design process to align with the resources, needs and vision of each program or business. He is currently working to build a design environment that consists of branding, style guides and design systems that align with the CCSQ ServiceNow Leadership's vision. 

Shannon Hu – UX Designer, ESS. Shannon is a UX Designer at Ventera, supporting Enterprise Shared Services (ESS). Shannon has a background in communication and interaction design. Working cross-functionally, she designs data-informed user solutions.  

Lesley Humphreys – Director of Human-Centered Design, Bellese Technologies. Lesley has been working in information design for over 15 years, and has been fortunate in that time to contribute to a diverse array of government projects, including a re-architecture of the US Forest Service and US Citizen and Immigration Service (USCIS) Web sites, the design of a new end-to-end patent review application for the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the ESRD Quality Reporting Systems (EQRS), the Medicare Payment System Modernization Program (MPSM), and Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR). She is a founder of the Baltimore UX Meetup, and has a User Experience Managers' Certification from the Nielsen Norman Group. 

Melissa Liupaeter - Melissa has been a visual designer with CMS since 2010. She directs the visual experience on all CMS consumer program websites like Medicare.gov and HealthCare.gov. Worked on a HealthCare.gov as art director for all product teams to use the CMS design system since CMS site ownership. Additionally, she is the Product Manager for CMS Design System and part of the new Division of Web Engagement (DWE) of the Office of Communication (OC)'s Web and Emerging Technologies Group (WETG) at CMS.