USDA FNS Innovation Hub — a portfolio of federal service projects
Design work inside the Food & Nutrition Service Innovation Hub — SNAP, WIC, school meals, and the tooling that runs them.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Year
- 2024 — present
- Platform
- Web · Internal tooling · Public-facing services
- Industry
- Federal Government · Public Benefits · Nutrition Services
USDA Food & Nutrition Service runs the country's largest food-assistance programs (SNAP, WIC, school meals), serving tens of millions of Americans. The Innovation Hub is where FNS invests in modernizing the digital services those programs run on. This is an overview of the design work I'm doing inside the Hub, framed as a portfolio of projects rather than a single deep-dive.
This case study is in progress. The projects behind this work are federal, so I'm careful about what I share and when. What I can say publicly right now: I'm designing workflows across several Innovation Hub initiatives, from public-facing benefit applications to internal case-management tools used by state agencies and USDA staff. The through-line is the same as every other case study on this site. I map the workflow of the humans involved (an applicant, a caseworker, a state program administrator) before any pixels get drawn.
What was broken.
Federal service design has one hard constraint: the users you're designing for aren't optional. If a WIC application form is confusing, a family loses formula. If a SNAP portal times out, someone doesn't get groceries. The stakes are as high as enterprise UX gets, and the accessibility bar is a legal minimum, not a nice-to-have.
The second constraint is the operating environment. Federal work moves through procurement cycles, security reviews, cross-agency coordination, and 508 compliance in ways that private-sector product teams don't see. Workflow first isn't a slogan here. It is the only way the design survives contact with how the government ships software.
Fuller writeups per project will land here as they're cleared for public sharing.
Workflow first — the operating principle inside every Hub project
Every project I take inside the Innovation Hub starts the same way. I map the workflow. Who is the applicant, who is the caseworker, who is the state administrator, who is the USDA program officer, and how does information move between them? Federal services rarely fail because a form is ugly. They fail because a handoff drops information between an applicant and a caseworker, or between a state system and a federal one. That is where I focus.
A proper flow diagram per project will land here once each is cleared for sharing. For now, the shape below is the shared pattern every Hub project follows.
- 01
Applicant enters the service
A family or an individual starts a benefit application, a school-meal renewal, or a change-of-circumstance report. This is the first mile.
Applicant - 02
Application routed to the right state
Federal programs are state-administered. The applicant's data has to route to the right state agency, in the right format, with the right verifications attached.
System - 03
Caseworker reviews and adjudicates
A caseworker at a state agency picks up the case, verifies eligibility, asks for any missing information, and issues a determination.
State Caseworker - 04
Applicant is notified and served
The applicant hears the outcome, and if approved, starts receiving benefits: EBT card, WIC voucher, meal eligibility.
System + Applicant - 05
State reports up to USDA FNS
State agencies report participation and outcome data back to USDA FNS on a regular cadence, feeding federal oversight and program-integrity work.
State Agency + USDA FNS
From tangled to shipped.
Understand the current-state workflow before proposing anything
Every project starts with weeks of listening: to program officers, state administrators, caseworkers, and applicants. I document the current-state workflow before I hold a design opinion. Federal services already exist and already work for millions of people. The design job is to remove friction without breaking what is working.
Workflow first, then interface
Once the current state is mapped, I design the target workflow. Only then do I move to screens. Prototypes are built to the accessibility bar from day one, because retrofitting a11y in federal work is expensive and often impossible.
Design decisions get sanity-checked against fifty state realities
Federal work has to survive fifty state implementations. A pattern that works in one state can be legally impossible in another. I design in close contact with state pilots to catch those constraints early.
The moves that worked.
Detailed writeups coming
As individual Innovation Hub projects are cleared for public sharing, I'll add proper case studies to this site. Each one will follow the workflow-first structure you see across the rest of this portfolio.
What shipped. What changed.
Case study in progress. Outcome writeups per project will land here as they're cleared. If you're at USDA FNS or a partner agency and want a walkthrough of specific work, reach out and I can share more on a call.
“Federal service design has made me even more disciplined about workflow first. When the stakes are whether a family gets formula this week, you don't get to guess at the flow. You map it, you validate it with real caseworkers and real applicants, and you defend it against every design decision that would compromise it.”
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