Award-winning Ideation Web Dev, UX, and a11y
Challenge
Build a custom ideation platform for the Federal Aviation Administration (then expanded to the whole of the Department of Transportation). The platform was to server the tens of thousands of DOT employees and allow them to surface issues within their sub-organization or with the DOT as a whole and propose and iterate on solutions.
Rationale
Prior to ideation platforms like UserVoice which were just in their infancy, the FAA wanted to create a platform to improve employee engagement and raise issues and potential solutions to the executives. The Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood saw this and decided it would be great for the entire Department of Transportation as a whole. This was my first real foray into both User Experience and Accessibility. I was lead developer and working with the design and UX team (a first for us at the FAA) to translate the requirements into actionable User Stories and then code reality. As a high-profile site serving the entire DOT employee base, the Section 508 compliance officer rightfully made it a point to ensure not just 508 but also WCAG compliance (this was before they were aligned in law) and thus began my "baptism by fire" in Accessibility. Ultimately, it received an award from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for being one of the top 25 innovations in government for 2013.
Critique
What started as a year-long project ultimately ended up crammed into 3 months once all the bureaucratical hurdles, hoops, and turf wars had been jumped through and fought. Thankfully, it had the backing of the Secretary so it was able to evolve over time beyond what was launchable on such a tight timeframe.