Digital Product Modernization
Defining a modernization direction for two high-friction digital products through strategy, research, and high-fidelity prototyping.
Overview
The Digital Product Modernization initiative focused on rethinking two high-impact digital products within the Department of Labor ecosystem: the public-facing DOL Forms experience and Labornet, the internal employee intranet.
I approached this effort as a vision-setting and de-risking exercise, using research, journey mapping, and high-fidelity prototypes to clarify what modernization should mean before significant engineering investment.
Both products were widely used, operationally critical, and increasingly misaligned with user expectations around findability, accessibility, and clarity. Rather than incremental fixes, the work aimed to define a credible future direction that could reduce friction, support scale, and withstand long-term governance constraints.
My Role
Responsibilities included:
Defining the modernization vision for each product, grounded in user needs and organizational constraints
Leading research synthesis and identifying the highest-impact friction points
Designing and prototyping future-state product experiences to support alignment and decision-making
Acting as the primary UX liaison across OCIO, content owners, accessibility specialists, and delivery teams
Ensuring all concepts aligned with accessibility, governance, and sustainability requirements
I served as the UX Strategy Lead and product design lead across both modernization pilots.
I was responsible for making the strategy tangible. The goal was not to deliver production code, but to create prototypes and frameworks that leadership could trust, test, and use to guide phased modernization.
context
Both products were critical to daily operations, yet shaped by legacy structures and tooling.
At the time of this work, the Forms experience represented one of the highest-traffic entry points into DOL’s public services, while Labornet served as a central hub for internal communication and task completion. In both cases, users faced fragmented navigation, inconsistent content structure, and limited support for task-based discovery.
Modernization efforts were constrained by existing systems, procurement realities, and the need to maintain uninterrupted service. This required a strategy that could clarify direction without disrupting operations, and that acknowledged both immediate needs and long-term scalability.
Strategy
The strategy prioritized clarity and alignment before velocity.
Rather than starting with feature lists or interface updates, I focused on understanding how users actually sought information and completed tasks, and where the products failed to support those behaviors.
Key strategic moves included:
Reframing navigation and search around user intent rather than organizational structure.
Exploring AI-supported discovery patterns to reduce cognitive load and improve findability.
Designing metadata-driven content models to support relevance, accessibility, and future expansion.
Using high-fidelity prototypes to test assumptions, surface trade-offs, and accelerate stakeholder alignment.
The prototypes functioned as decision tools, not just visual artifacts. They allowed teams to evaluate feasibility, risk, and value before committing to build.
The emphasis was on creating shared understanding. Strategy succeeded when stakeholders could see, discuss, and critique concrete options rather than abstract plans.
modernization snapshot
This work produced decision artifacts, not finished products.
The goal was to give leadership clear visibility to fully evaluate modernization paths, and WebOpps a concrete way forward in a dynamic roadmap, before and while spinning up builds.
What these artifacts represent
A clear contrast between legacy systems and proposed product direction
High-fidelity prototypes used to surface risk, tradeoffs, and feasibility early
Design decisions grounded in accessibility, scale, and long-term maintainability
These were used to align stakeholders, clarify scope, and establish a credible foundation for future execution.
Key decisions reinforced
Treating mission-critical systems as products with defined audiences, not content repositories.
Prioritizing navigation, task clarity, and information architecture over surface-level redesign.
Designing interaction patterns that could support future automation and AI-assisted workflows.
Making governance and accessibility first-order design inputs, not downstream fixes.
OUTCOMES
Defined a modernized product direction for both Forms and Labornet.
Produced high-fidelity prototypes that informed roadmap discussions and prioritization.
Established reusable patterns for search, wayfinding, and content structure.
Introduced AI-supported discovery concepts focused on clarity and usability.
Improved alignment across product, content, accessibility, and governance stakeholders.
Although the work concluded at the prototype stage, it provided a clear, defensible foundation for future delivery. The value lay in reducing uncertainty and enabling informed investment decisions.
What This Approach Demonstrates
This work reflects how I approach early-stage modernization, new technology adoption, and maintain end user-focused optimization, in complex environments.
The modernization initiative demonstrates how product strategy can operate as a risk-reduction and alignment function, especially when systems are large, expectations are high, and the cost of misdirection is significant.
These two case studies, Labornet and DOL Forms experience, show how research-led strategy, clear decision frameworks, and tangible prototypes can guide modernization as well as new technology adoption efforts, before engineering begins, and set teams up for durable success rather than short-term fixes.
While delivered within a public-sector context, the challenges addressed here are shared by enterprise and regulated organizations across industries: legacy systems, fragmented content, accessibility requirements, and the need to modernize without disrupting critical services.