The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS) Office of Information Technology (OIT) wanted to embrace human-centered design in its systems and processes. But adopting a new practice agency-wide meant asking people to change how they'd always worked.
Shifting long-standing habits is never easy, no matter how clear the value is.
Communication across teams was siloed, and design decisions often came down to individual preference rather than shared standards. Reviews cycled endlessly too, with no consistent way to measure whether a decision was actually working for the people using it.
Before building anything, Fearless met with OIT's administrators, product owners, executive leaders, and practitioners to understand their roles, goals, and frustrations. That discovery work became a set of personas and a roadmap CMS could actually use, and a pilot program built on top of it showed real improvement in both team culture and comprehension.
CMS employees got interactive, self-paced courses, practicums, and open studios, built to meet people where they were rather than demand they learn one fixed way. That flexibility is what drove high rates of adoption across teams that had never worked this way before.
Fearless designed and launched the eHCD microsite, a single place any CMS employee could go to learn about human-centered design, sign up for events, or connect with the eHCD team.
Working with product owners on CMSConnect, Fearless built a global Design System rooted in usability and consistency, with a component library that pairs every UI element with the reasoning behind it. Product teams now make design decisions grounded in shared standards, and in step with partners across the broader system.
Practitioners and vendors now collaborate 'badgeless,' aligned on a shared mission instead of separate agendas.