School of Visual Arts

Maryland Institute College of Art

Ongoing self-development & study

School For Poetic Computation

New York Studio Residency Program

Product Design Manager @ Grammarly

Shaping the delivery & technical implementation of the State of Minnesota's paid family & medical leave programs, by conducting user research with medical & benefit providers and utilizing findings to inform product decisions, in collaboration with a wide range of cross-functional teams & Minnesota staff.

New America

Service Designer & User Researcher

Grammarly is used by 30M people & 70K teams worldwide to up-level their communication by providing comprehensive situational & goal-oriented writing guidance personalized to the user & their audience. 

Led a globally distributed design team to create an enterprise-quality, accessible, and trustworthy user experience across all product surfaces, including web (editor & browser extensions), desktop (Windows & Mac), and mobile (Android & iOS). 

Supported senior & staff-level product designers, design system designers, design technologists, and accessibility specialists and guided their impact on the business in their respective program areas, including:

• Grammarly Design System
• Accessibility
• App actions
• Cross-platform user experiences on web, desktop & mobile
• Trust, privacy, security, identity

Also led the design team in the Mobile organization for the first year.

Grammarly

Group Manager, Product Design | Platform & Trust

Rally re-balanced power dynamics between people and large technology companies by enabling researchers to study societal problems using web browsing data that users donate with consent. 

• Established the research & design function. Developed talent acquisition strategy & operations for all cross-disciplinary roles. Shortened Mozilla’s typical time-to-hire from 6 to 2 months.

• Identified the product’s north star & early product scope through expert facilitation. Directed the discovery, design, and build of early product iterations in the market, including improving the team's learning quality.

• Launched pilot research studies with academic researchers, data scientists and journalists at Princeton & Stanford Universities and The Markup on issues like news consumption, misinformation, effects of online advertising, and data privacy. 

• Reduced what Meta (Facebook), Google and other large technology companies track about its users across the internet. The Markup’s Pixel Hunt study found that 80% of the 5,400 users who donated their data to Rally encountered the Meta Pixel on websites they visited. Rally enabled The Markup to gain deep insights into Meta’s pervasive tracking infrastructure and write award winning investigative journalism. This joint effort led to multiple class action lawsuits & warnings from Congress and pressure on companies to change their practices.

• Facilitated skill-building discussions with cross-functional managers across Mozilla.

Mozilla

Head of Product Design, Rally @ Mozilla

Research & Design Lead, in a leads of leads role, managed 10 researchers & designers across 3 squads, on a larger cross-functional team of 40. The teams I led designed a case management platform that enabled thousands of Veterans Affairs staff (attorneys, judges, admin staff, and 15+ user groups) to make timely and accurate decisions about Veteran appeals. The team infrastructure I put in place enabled the team to build the product more consistently & reliably and provide faster incremental value to the VA and Veterans. Our work reduced case processing time (or the average time Veterans waited for a decision from the VA) from 5 years to 1 year.

Nava

Research & Design Lead — Modernized VA’s business processes to improve outcomes for Veterans

Research & Design Lead, on a crisis response team of 6. With California’s Employment Development Department (EDD), my team rapidly launched 3 products that served unemployed people during the first 2 months of COVID-19. Led discovery research to identify longer-term opportunities for California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) to create an improved experience for people to track their unemployment claims.

Research & Design Lead — Improved the experience of applying for unemployment in California

Research & Design Lead, on a team of 5. Nava partnered and drove forward Vermont’s Agency of Human Services’ Integrated Eligibility & Enrollment Program vision to ensure that Vermonters can easily gain and maintain access to the benefits that they’re eligible for, like Medicaid.

Research & Design Lead — Designing an all-in-one government benefits application for Vermonters

Research & Design Lead across 2 squads with 10 content strategists & designers, on a larger team of 20. My team worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to launch a new website for VA healthcare facilities in Pittsburgh. On the front end, we made it easier for Veterans to find, understand, and use information about health care and benefits on VA.gov. On the back end, we created a new content management system that improved the experience for VA staff to create, edit, and maintain VA.gov’s content. This pilot was used as a template to scale the product to all of VA’s 1,200 healthcare facilities.

Research & Design Lead — Transformed VA.gov & its content management system

Research & Design Lead, on a team of 5. I led a 4-month research effort and identified 6 high-impact areas ripe for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to modernize how Medicare pays doctors by improving the agility, velocity, usability, and sustainability of Fee for Service (FFS) systems. The research findings led to additional multi-million dollar contracts for Nava, and were just the beginning of a multi-year Medicare Payment Systems Modernization effort at CMS.

Research & Design Lead — Modernizing how Medicare pays doctors

Nava partners with government agencies to make services simple, effective & accessible to all.

• Managed 7 product designers, researchers & content designers in a matrixed environment. Successfully delivered promotions, including into senior roles & people management. 

• Partnered with design leadership to scale the design team from 6 to 40 people. Matured its culture, rituals and capabilities over 2 years. Built hiring infrastructure for new roles: content design & design management. Developed a framework for roles & responsibilities for designers and scaled it across all programs. Established a community of practice for design leads. 

• Partnered with cross-functional leadership & executives to scale the company. Led trainings to prepare more people to step into team leadership and people management roles. Contributed to business development proposals that led to new contracts.

• Accountable for research & design on several enterprise & customer-facing products that served 200M people & brought in $50M in revenue. Partners include the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the States of Vermont & California. Teams ranged from a crisis response team of 6 people to a large cross-functional team of 40 people with multiple squads. Selected impact from the teams I led [below]:

Senior Product Design Manager

Researcher & Designer. Scoped, prototyped, piloted, and implemented ideal interactions and transitions between thousands of VA staff (attorneys, judges, admin staff and 15+ user groups) to ensure increase timely, accurate decisions about Veteran appeals.

Researcher & Designer — Modernizing VA's business processes with Caseflow

Led research & interaction design for login.gov, the U.S. public’s one account for the government from 0 to 1, a new & transformative concept within the federal government that systematically improved the customer experience of federal identity systems. Login.gov is now used by 85M+ people using 460+ critical public services from 45+ federal agencies and states, providing services to all 15 Cabinet agencies. A career highlight!

• Identified user needs & technical requirements by utilizing a range of human-centered design methodologies, including discovery research, comparative analysis, academic & desk research, usability testing conducted remotely and intercept testing conducted in public government buildings, low-fidelity wireframes & high-fidelity interactive prototypes. We ensured that the core user experience, content, and implementation approach were resilient, robust & scalable, by focusing research on user comprehension, comfort, and capability. 

• Designed & led multiple workshops with internal & external stakeholders to evaluate business needs & technical requirements, identify goals, and build understanding & consensus on how the end-to-end user interface will meet privacy, security, accessibility & usability goals. 

• Collaborated with senior leadership & technical staff from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) and United States Digital Service (USDS). 

• Ran initial pilots with Social Security Administration (SSA) & Trusted Traveler Programs (TTP).

Senior Interaction Designer & Researcher — login.gov, U.S. public’s one account for the government

Conducted foundational nationwide research to improve the end-to-end experience of public benefits for people & benefit providers, in partnership with U.S. Digital Services. Research included 80 contextual interviews, site visits, and service trials with applicants, non-profit staff, and local program administrators across 7 states. Prototyped an MVP of a mobile-friendly multi-benefit application platform. This work influenced & informed follow-up initiatives by others in the government technology ecosystem.

Researcher — Improve the end-to-end experience of public benefits for people & benefit providers

Led research identifying challenges and opportunities in 18F’s workplace culture. My team interviewed 30 people, from within 18F, technology professionals outside of 18F, and diversity experts. Our work led to more targeted initiatives, including hiring people who are focused on improving the diversity of, and professional growth, opportunities and wellbeing of staff.

Research Lead — Establishing diversity, equity and inclusion priorities

Researcher & Designer for myUSA, which offered account management services for government websites. The work I did was later utilized for the shaping of the early stages of login.gov -- a product team on which I was Senior Interaction Designer & Researcher.

Researcher & Designer — myUSA (later integrated into login.gov)

Led content strategy & design iterations for Signal's website during Signal's Winter Break of Code.

Signal Messenger

Designer

The Berkman Center’s mission is to explore and understand the Internet. During graduate school, I joined Berkman as the sole designer in a cohort of law and policy students. Led qualitative research, design and operational, monitoring & evaluation and communications plan to increase public accountability & transparency and improve civic organizations’ capacity to develop technological innovations in preparation for & in tandem with the 2015 elections in Nigeria.

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

Researcher & Designer

Part of Columbia University's School of Engineering and The Earth Institute, this lab designs software solutions to improve the delivery of critical services like health and energy around the world. It included full time designers, engineers, and Columbia University students. I designed Formhub, an open source mobile data collection, analysis and visualization tool which has evolved into a wonderful independent company, Ona.io.

Meghana Khandekar | Freelance

Lead Interaction Designer — Sustainable Engineering Lab @ Columbia University

Irrive was an early-stage startup whose goal was to help people manage & share their travel plans. Key voice and contributions to product vision, research & rapid ideation, prototyping and high-fidelity design for the first user experience & brand identity. Acquired by TripAdvisor.

Lead Designer — Irrive

Clients: Signal Messenger, Berkman Center for Internet & Society @ Harvard University, Development Seed, Imperative, General Cybernetics, Sustainable Engineering Lab @ Columbia University, World Bank, Reboot, Irrive. Highlights —

Interaction Designer — during graduate school (MFA in Interaction Design @ SVA)

I was the first designer on this new team which was formed to identify, prototype and scale technologies and practices that strengthen UNICEF’s work for children. Today, the innovation group’s initiatives and offices have expanded to an international scale, with human-centered and agile design being essential to their strategy. 

• Led projects as the sole cross-disciplinary designer for work across several countries in climate change, community mapping and social organization — all content strategy and design, including brand and press material, digital and print media, websites, data visualizations and presentations.
• Projects: RapidSMS, Unite for Climate, UN Global Pulse, Crabgrass, Map Kibera.

UNICEF

Lead Designer

Wonderfactory built massively complex websites and apps with Fortune 100 publishers and media companies. Contributed design across web and print in collaboration with cross-functional and client partners to achieve business goals.

• Projects: Large-scale, end-to-end website design for Food Network, Washington Post, Martha Stewart and Comcast, including ideation, prototyping, high-fidelity design, documentation.