Designing inside the federal government

My design practice was shaped inside the federal government. Through Softtek Government Solutions, I designed web experiences and internal tools for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the National Cancer Institute, and Health & Human Services — organizing dense, high-stakes content so the people who depend on it could actually use it.

All of it happened in a Section 508, accessibility-first environment, alongside career staff and contractor teams, within the security and infrastructure realities of government delivery.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative sits inside the Executive Office of the President, where the content is trade policy — dense, technical, and consequential, written by specialists but read by everyone from negotiators to the public. Designing for USTR meant structuring that material so both audiences could navigate it.

At the National Cancer Institute and Health & Human Services, the work turned toward health — public-facing web experiences and internal tools for staff whose day-to-day work is required, repetitive, and high-stakes. Different agencies, same discipline: the user often has no choice but to use what you build, so every friction is a tax.

Day to day, that meant information architecture for policy-heavy content, internal workflow tools for career staff, and web presence that had to serve expert and public audiences at once. Accessibility ran through all of it — designing to Section 508 obligations from the first wireframe, not as a retrofit.

Just as much of the job was alignment: facilitating agreement across career staff, leadership, and contractor teams, then shipping through security review, legacy systems, and procurement reality. Federal work products belong to the government, so this page describes the work rather than showing internal screens — but the discipline it built shows up in everything after it.

Everything since carries the imprint. The Bright MLS work treated professional users like the mandatory-use users they are; FlowOS and Canopy model workflows with the rigor of systems that can't fail quietly; and accessibility remains a default, not a feature.

For government and enterprise consulting teams, this is the shorthand: I've designed inside your constraints before, and I know the difference between what a deck promises and what security review allows.