Human-Centered Design + Research
Service Designer | Government + Public Service Sector
The following are three notable projects I led during my time at Deloitte. Due to the sensitive nature of government consulting, specific project details are subject to strict confidentiality. As a result, certain information has been intentionally omitted.
Higher Education
Client: Higher-Ed Coordinating Board
Audience: K-12, adult learners, and transfer students
Role: Service Design Lead - discovery research, user testing, client collaboration
The Goal
Help 60% of adults in Texas, ages 25–64, earn a degree, certificate, or other valuable post-secondary credential by 2030—driving job growth, raising incomes, and closing the skills gap with a future-ready workforce.
The Research
Guiding Question:
How might we propel K-12 and adult learners toward degree, credential, and job attainment on My Texas Future (MTF)?
150+ participants across the US
Engaged a diverse range of higher-ed aspirants—adult learners, transfer students, K–12 students—and key stakeholders like employers, counselors, and board members.
4 discovery + 24 user testing sprints
MTF became a connected ecosystem of tools for higher-ed aspirants, shaped through moderated and unmoderated research methods like tree testing, A/B testing, and card sorting.
Iterative Approach
Research artifacts included experience principles, modes/mindsets, role-based personas, journey maps, and process maps—refined through each discovery phase to reflect evolving audience needs.
Understanding the K-12 Journey
Using generative research, we explored K–12 transitions into high school and college—focusing on interest exploration, support systems, and identifying key gaps and opportunities.
With counselors, administrators, and educators, we also gauged ways to best serve and engage this age group within the existing MTF experience. These supporters were asked to go to MyTexasFuture.org and share their impressions and how it could better serve the K12 audience.
The Ecosystem
MTF was designed to be scalable to adapt to evolving market conditions and growing student populations in Texas. Since it’s development, My Texas Future has incorporated other products within the client ecosystem namely MapMyPath and MapMyGrad.
The Findings
Recurring themes were used to form five guiding design pillars, which informed design decisions at both macro and micro levels — from prioritizing features in the product roadmap to defining specific screen controls. These pillars also serve as the foundation for the Product Roadmap themes.
Dream with me.
Show me students like me,
show me it's possible.
Connect me to my future.
Connect me to what I don’t know,
connect me to others.
Put all of me first.
Keep my best interests and realities in mind.
Build on my momentum.
Tailor it to my needs, build on my needs.
Help me make it happen.
Make it simple, make it worth my time.
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The Findings
Experience Principles
Recurring themes were used to form five guiding design pillars, which informed design decisions at both macro and micro levels — from prioritizing features in the product roadmap to defining specific screen controls. These pillars also serve as the foundation for the Product Roadmap themes.
Modes
Modes are collections of tasks and actions that users perform in the course of navigating their path to higher education.
Modes were leveraged to identify and prioritize epics, feature sets, and user stories for design and development. They also helped us ensure we’re building the functionality that our different user groups need.
Mindsets
Mindsets are the outlooks and approaches that users bring to the modes they are acting in. Mindsets can shift over time based on the context of the user.
Mindsets helped our team design UX, UI, and content catered to the most common approaches our user groups take as they interact with the My Texas Future portal. When combined with role-based personas, they provide a fluid and dynamic way to understand users.
Role-Based Personas
When combined with the modes and mindsets, which cover actions taken by users and contextual behavior we observed during our research, role-based personas allowed us to further refine our understanding of feature and permission sets required for users while still avoiding the unconscious bias of traditional personas.
Journey Maps
To map out pain points and opportunities in alignment with the user's journey, our team created several current-state and future-state journey maps to directly inform the product roadmap. Each journey map also highlighted key data considerations, external touchpoints, and their relationship to the user's actions on their path to higher education
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Process Map
The process map translated our research into recommended features and functionality for MTF. It illustrates the actions an adult learner—used here as an example—would take within the MTF portal, along with the features, content, and data integrations that need to be incorporated. It presents a high-level, blue-sky vision of what MTF could become. We worked with the client to prioritize features, identifying those to include in the MVP and those to place in the backlog.
The Research Informed Solutions
During discovery research, one of the many needs revealed was a centralized career research tool—leading to the creation of the Career Explorer, where authenticated users can search and save results in one place.
The live MTF website features tools like Program Explorer, Career Explorer, Career Quiz, and Action Plans—plus MapMyGrad, MapMyPath, and ApplyTexas. The initiative sparked new projects and earned the client the 2023 SHEEO Exceptional Agency Award and TASSCC Project Excellence Award for innovation in public service.
The Ongoing R&D
For each additional product and iteration of MTF, additional discovery research was conducted to inform iterations of each output, building upon previous findings to create a more holistic approach.
