Stacy Merrill Surla
User Experience Strategist
CASE STUDIES
I led the project team and designed the approach to stand up the pilot Customer Experience Center of Excellence at USDA for GSA and the White House Office of American Innovation. My six-person team worked with GSA project owners, USDA stakeholders, field staff, and American farmers and ranchers. Together we established and demonstrated that people-centered research, planning, and implementation make it possible for high-stakes digital products, like Farmers.gov, to succeed.
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One of the most interesting parts of this project was the team's use of research, customer journey mapping, participatory design, and workshopping to iteratively test and refine our hypotheses about issues facing farmers and USDA staff, and the potential solutions to these problems. The rounds of research at headquarters and at 6 sites across the U.S. were interspersed with a series of workshops culminating with a solutions session that engaged developers, decision-makers, and program execution staff.
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Leave-behinds to support the USDA's Center of Excellence included Journey Mapping and CX Playbooks, Personas, and a roadmap of features for the citizen-facing Farmers.gov. The success of this demonstration project led to the team piloting a Center of Excellence at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is transforming IT development by integrating user-centered approaches into its processes.
For the CALM project, I supported the Agile development team as it rapidly designed, built, and deployed a system to manage the acquisitions lifecycle with a user-centered system through which contracting officers and program staff can initiate and collaborate upon contracts. My work included business process improvement for user-centered design and usability research.
For the MACPro project, I focused on integrating UX into the team's SAFe Agile framework in support of turning around a failed large-scale deployment of a system for States to submit Medicaid State Plan Amendments. I conducted research in the field with State and CMS users, and facilitated workshops for customer journey mapping and persona development.
I spearheaded the development of a corporate in-house process for rapid design and launch of products, systems, and services. This framework for driving innovation enables small, cross-disciplinary teams to accomplish large outcomes in an intensive but short period of time by leveraging Lean UX, design thinking, and Agile methods.
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My outputs included a bootcamp-style training for implementing the method and an explainer video to promote the use of this method -- both efforts accomplished using the process. Over the course of two years I engaged project staff and clients in applying this method in more than a dozen projects to produce technical assessments, website designs, content recommendations, architectures, and more.
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Relatedly, I embarked on discovering how UX processes can be successfully integrated into Agile development -- which is not itself a user-centered method. Through projects for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, and through a Lean UX/Agile workshop, I am making strides into defining and integrating how UX can be integrated into Agile projects along a continuum of UX and Agile maturity.
Smokefree is a multi-channel behavior change initiative whose purpose is to help people quit smoking. I designed and led workshops, multi-week Lean Volte engagements, and Hack Days to support the program as it evolved and extended its reach over time.
During one engagement the team evaluated technical options for Survivorship.cancer.gov to assess ways to increase user engagement and provide social support through the website. Coupling end user research, leadership working sessions, and a technical assessment, the effort resulted in recommendations on social networking options including leveraging existing social media platforms.
In another major effort I led a 10 person team to evaluate connecting Smokefree's disparate digital channels into a cohesive user experience that enables content and features to be published across platforms.
The mission of eBenefits was to put directly into Veterans' hands the ability to access their service records, apply for benefits, search for jobs, and track the status of their own claims. To accomplish this ambitious task, it was necessary to not only integrate disparate backend systems, but to define at the outset an extensible architecture for integrations going forward. Making sure the platform's features solved Veterans' actual problems, and that the system we designed was usable and accessible, required user experience to take an equal footing to technical design.
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I defined and integrated UX strategy into Agile execution in this high-profile citizen-facing transactional portal project. This included hiring and managing a 14-person UX team, overseeing user research, information architecture, visual design, content strategy, and front end development. I also represented UX strategy and governance on the SAFe portfolio team.
This ambitious effort laid the groundwork for the VA's Veteran-centric approach to the Veterans.gov website.