The Setup
My manager's first words to me:
"If you slow us down, I will fire you."
Fresh out of design school. New title: "Front-End Engineer." New company: SAIC's AI Innovation Factory — a team that moved fast and expected everyone in the room to carry their weight. My plan was to shadow my senior engineering mentor, learn the stack, and slowly find my footing.
That plan lasted about a week.
DHS came to us with a challenge: modernize the naturalization kiosk experience. Rather than award the contract outright, they split our AI department down the middle — two teams, head to head, live demo to government evaluators. Winner takes the contract. Losers go home with an Amazon gift card.
"Then they split me off from my senior mentor — the person who was supposed to show me how to code — and told me I was the lead on the prototype."
My team: PhD-level data scientists, ML engineers, domain experts with decades of experience in defense contracting. Me: three weeks in, no codebase familiarity, no senior support, and a voice in the back of my head warning me what would happen if I became the weak link.
They were expecting a fully coded working prototype. This was pre-ChatGPT. I didn't have the chops to build it from scratch in a sprint window — and I knew it. There was a panic attack involved. A floor was involved.
On my team
PhDs, ML engineers, domain experts
Expectation
Fully coded working prototype, live DHS demo
Context
Pre-ChatGPT. No mentor. Week three.
The Decision
Stop trying to code.
Start designing.
At some point — after the floor moment had passed — something obvious clicked: I was hired to design. Not to code. Not to do data science. To design.
So I stopped trying to be what I thought the room needed and started doing what I actually knew how to do. I pulled stakeholders together, ran the problem through a design lens, and asked the real question: what does a naturalization applicant actually need at a kiosk? What does the government currently fail to give them?
The answer was immediate: clarity. The naturalization process is months of procedural opacity — no honest timeline, no communication of what happens next, no acknowledgment that you're a person and not a case number. The information existed in government systems. It just wasn't being shown.
I didn't build a React app. I built a Figma prototype — complete, navigable, end-to-end — that told that story on every screen. And I walked DHS through it live.
A note on the design quality
I'm deliberately showing you screens with questionable visual design. That's the point. DHS didn't want fancy code or pixel-perfect UI. They wanted to see whether someone understood their problem and could show them a path through it. Storytelling, when story-told well and grounded in logical design, beats professional-level code every time. This is the evidence.
Result
The Figma prototype beat the coded alternative. We won the contract.
The Screen That Did It
The journey timeline.
Radical honesty in a government interface.
Decision 01
Address the applicant by name
"Bob Placeholder," — the applicant's name as the headline — isn't cosmetic. Government services are systematically impersonal. An interface that addresses you by name, that shows your position on your journey, makes a claim: this system sees you as a person, not a case number. That reframe was the emotional core of the entire demo.
Decision 02
Show the honest timeline upfront
"3–6 months after filing" is information USCIS buries in FAQ pages and call center queues. I put it directly on the kiosk screen. The data already existed — I designed an interface that showed it to the person who needed it. When evaluators saw this, they felt the gap between how the government currently treats applicants and how it could. That gap is what design creates.
Decision 03
"You are here" as anchor, not status
The naturalization process feels like featureless waiting. The "You are here" marker establishes that the applicant has a position, that the process has shape, that they are moving through something with a defined end. That reframe — from waiting to progressing — changes the emotional register of the entire experience.
The Rest of the Flow
The design isn't beautiful.
The story was.
The Persona Screen
A designed demo mechanism. Evaluators were randomly assigned a persona and stepped into the experience — they weren't watching Bob Placeholder go through naturalization, they were Bob Placeholder for five minutes. Demo design is a design discipline. This screen is why.
Identity Mismatch Alert
When the camera face doesn't match the passport photo, a red ALERT fires — with both images side by side for a human officer to review. Not a generic error. A specific, actionable signal designed for the person making the decision, not just the system detecting the problem.
Language Selection
Screen two. Unavoidable. Immediately establishing that this system works in your language — not buried in settings, not an afterthought. In a naturalization context, that signal matters before you've done anything else.
Biometric Feedback
"SUCCESS" fires the instant capture completes — not after a processing delay. In a kiosk context, users have no familiarity with the system. Immediate, unambiguous confirmation is the difference between someone who proceeds confidently and someone who scans their finger four times wondering if it worked.
Takeaways
What this actually
taught me.
When panic sets in, go back to what you actually know
I wasted time trying to be an engineer in a room full of engineers. The moment I stopped doing that and started doing design — the thing I was actually hired for — everything unlocked. Knowing what you're good at and trusting it under pressure is a skill. It took a floor moment to learn it.
Good storytelling beats good code
A Figma prototype beat a team of professional coders building a React app. DHS didn't want technical execution — they wanted to feel the solution. Story-told well, grounded in logical design structure, communicates more than any tech stack. That's not a consolation prize. That's the point.
The demo is a design surface
The persona mechanism, the flow sequencing, the emotional arc from "Touch to Initialize" to the journey timeline — all of it was designed deliberately. The experience evaluators had during the demo was as intentional as the screens themselves. That's not an accident.
The information already exists — it just isn't shown
The naturalization timeline uses data USCIS already has. I didn't invent it. I designed an interface that showed it to the person who needed it. That's the design gap in most government software: not missing data, but missing the interface that makes data legible to the human on the other side of the screen.