I get brought in when complex systems need to work for real people — not just on paper.

In this case, it meant solving a decades-old problem: childcare access across all branches of the U.S. military. What started as a policy mandate had never fully translated into a usable experience. My role was to step in as the UX strategist and turn that into something operational.

I worked across Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine systems to create a single, unified experience where any military parent — anywhere in the world — could quickly find and arrange childcare.

That meant designing a structure that could handle both global complexity and local nuance. A parent on a remote overseas base doesn’t plan the same way as someone in a major U.S. city, so the system had to adapt without breaking consistency.

I led cross-branch research to understand not just the logistics, but the real-world pressure families were under. From there, I rebuilt the experience — simplifying navigation, aligning workflows, and creating a framework that balanced each branch’s identity with a cohesive, shared system.

I also worked through the underlying mess — auditing and consolidating fragmented legacy platforms into something centralized, usable, and scalable.

The outcome wasn’t just a better interface — it was a system that actually worked for families trying to solve a real problem, often under stress and time constraints.