I'm including this case study not because the design is good — it isn't. I'm including it because of what happened when a terrified new hire stopped trying to be something they weren't, and just designed.
Outcome: Contract Award
Role
Lead Designer (title said: "Front-End Engineer")
Client
Department of Homeland Security
Team
SAIC Innovation Factory
Context
Internal hackathon · Pre-ChatGPT · Still wet behind the ears
Yup. Told you it was bad.
The Setup
My manager's first words to me: "If you slow us down, I will fire you."
Fresh out of design school, and the company branded my new role: "Front-End Engineer". Go figure. But I was hungry. SAIC's Innovation Factory moved fast and expected everyone in the room to carry their weight. The 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 citizenship journey. 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 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: brand-spanking-new, limited 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.
Remember I said this was pre-ChatGPT? They were expecting a fully coded, working prototype.
To impress the US Government.
There may have been a panic attack involved.
On my team
PhDs, ML engineers, domain experts
Expectation
Fully coded working prototype, live DHS demo
Context
Pre-ChatGPT. Rookie. No mentor.
My actual skill
Design.
The Decision
Stop trying to code. Start designing.
At some point — after a brief moment of terror — something obvious clicked: I was hired to problem solve. Not to code. Not to do data science. But to solve complex problems, through 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? 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
Government services are systematically impersonal. One name on a screen makes a different claim.
Decision 02
Show the honest timeline upfront
The data already existed. I just designed an interface that showed it to the person who needed it.
Decision 03
"You are here" as anchor, not status
From waiting to progressing. One marker 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, everything unlocked.
Good storytelling > good code
A Figma prototype beat a React app. DHS didn't want technical execution — they wanted to feel the solution.
The demo is a design surface
Flow sequencing, emotional arc, persona mechanism — all designed. The demo wasn't a presentation. It was the product.
The information already exists — it just wasn't shown
Most government software isn't missing data. It's missing the intuitive interface that makes the solution clear.
