Streamlining a publishing workflow with strict requirements
Project Overview: The Department of Health Services needed to modernize how public handbooks, bulletins, and memos were created and maintained online.
The goal was to replace outdated, PDF-heavy workflows that required multiple applications and tools with a streamlined, web-based publishing tool that made content easier to create, manage, and access, while meeting strict requirements
My Role: Senior UX Designer and Strategist responsible for research, publication and workflow audits, design discovery, component design and theming, design layouts, stakeholder presentations, developer/engineer collaboration
Project Wins
- Established a repeatable working session model that strengthened collaboration and surfaced requirements earlier
- Helped the client and team navigate complex approval processes across multiple DHS departments
- Expanded DHS’s design system in ways that made it more flexible and sustainable for future projects
- Stepped into strategy leadership, ensuring that team decisions were aligned with user needs and project goals
- Contributed to EditTogether, an open-source collaborative editing tool for Drupal
*All work done while at Palantir.net
I joined the project as a Senior UX Designer and, when the strategist left the company, I stepped into a dual UX design and strategy role. With this change, I included I led weekly client working sessions to uncover requirements, which allowed us to map workflows and prioritize sprint goals. My time on this project spanned about 1 year and involved working closely with contractors that managed this work for the Department of Health, as well as gaining approvals from all parties.
One of the research tasks I led was an audit of handbooks and user manuals. This mapping exercise revealed interface redundancies and served as a guide for design and build, ensuring every content area across all types was accounted for. It also gave the team a deeper understanding of the functionality needed to rebuild each of these content types.
In addition to these audits, I evaluated and helped plan the customized editing tools, confirming they met accessibility standards, usability needs, and best practices. For example, I played an early role in planning for the tools that were going to be a part of an open source collaborative editing tool for Drupal, which included real-time and simultaneous collaboration.
The WYSIWYG editor was built from scratch by the developers on the team and had to be planned based on editing requirements and best practices. I initiated a process of design QC to ensure that each component functioned as expected based on widely used WYSIWYG toolbars and client needs and worked closely with developers to achieve this. This also included making sure the toolbar fully functioned while using only your keyboard.
Images show an annotated audit of one of the publication types and an early version of the collaborative editor with comments. I also built an interactive prototype of comment interactions in Figma both for client reviews and developer collaboration.
I also led accessibility testing by embedding automated and manual QA into sprints, ensuring WCAG compliance was integrated into the product build. To track this, I created a Google Doc table outlining each issue, its impact (via Axe DevTools), and linked ticketed work to ensure clear resolution paths.
