Designing for the
worst day
of someone’s life.
Displaced families waiting in shelters. Six disconnected tools. A federal clock running. I led design and delivery — one record for three roles that had never shared a system, deployed nationally inside a single disaster response cycle. It had to work for an untrained volunteer on day one, under surge, with federal oversight active from the moment it went live. It did. 1,689 cases in the first two weeks.
Request the full case studyEvery added field is a case not opened.
I spent more time navigating screens than talking to the family in front of me.
Identity, residency, eligibility — all resolved before the first line item is entered.
No export. No spreadsheet. One click.
Urgency bars replaced sorting — supervisors moved to the highest-priority case automatically.
First time all three operational signals were visible without leaving the platform.
Six systems. Three roles.
One source of truth.
A new information model — not a consolidation of what existed. Six tools had grown around six functions, none designed to share data. The only path forward was to design the data architecture first, the interface second.
Three fields.
Everything else invisible.
Three fields on the intake form trigger eligibility checks, identity verification, and FEMA audit trail generation — automatically. The caseworker sees simplicity. The architecture holds everything else.
One record.
Three completely different jobs.
Same record, three role-specific views, zero redundant data entry. The field volunteer never thinks about FEMA compliance. The finance officer never re-enters what the caseworker already captured. One information model built to serve all three.
10× volume.
Zero retraining required.
Urgency bars replaced a caseworker decision: which case needs me most? Under 10× surge, removing that choice was the difference between a manageable queue and a frozen one.