INDUSTRY:
Government
CLIENT:
IRS
YEAR:
2021-2025
EXPERIENCE:
UX/Product Design & Strategy
IRS: Automation & Optimization
Overview.
This multi-year project is part of a massive IRS modernization effort, involving large-scale development teams and multiple lines of business. As UX Lead, I manage a distributed team of experience designers working across numerous development teams. Together, we’ve been driving forward a unified approach to design, ensuring consistency, scalability, and usability throughout the program.
Challenge & context.
The IRS managed millions of cases annually through legacy systems, paper, manual workflows, and inconsistent routing. One of the major challenges was also navigating the complex stakeholder landscape, including changes in leadership and strict union rules, that added constraints to testing and deployment. Balancing these realities while still ensuring user-centered outcomes required careful planning, facilitation, and alignment across diverse groups.
Discovery & research.
Our team led workshops across multiple IRS divisions, conducting journey mapping and service blueprinting to capture operational bottlenecks and system dependencies. Maps for several divisions helped unify perspectives and highlight cross-system pain points.
Design philosophy & approach.
We combined human-centered design with AI-enabled tooling, using Pega Blueprint to accelerate persona development and case modeling. While journey maps and service blueprints were human-authored, AI tools helped create reusable, modular case templates for faster validation.
Solution & key deliverables.
Beyond leading the mapping, design and research effort, we established a design system and documented common design patterns to increase consistency across IRS applications. This provided teams with clear standards, sped up delivery, and reduced duplication of effort. By embedding UX practices into the development cycle, we created a foundation that scales with the program’s scope.
Key deliverables included:
Case flows for intake, fallout resolution, correspondence, and closure
AI-enhanced personas and workflows built with Pega Blueprint
A Reuse Map for leveraging existing IRS functionality to minimize development time in new applications
Story maps that visualized operational complexity at scale
Comprehensive design system with reusable UI components, common design patterns and their use cases
Results & business outcomes.
Despite the complexity of the environment, our team has successfully delivered designs that are now central to the IRS modernization roadmap. The design system has become a baseline for future applications, and our structured approach has helped maintain clarity and momentum across this multi-year, multi-team initiative.
The modernization effort streamlined workflows, reduced manual intervention, and improved case visibility across roles. ROI came from faster resolution times, reduced backlog, and reusable case structures that accelerated future application builds.
Disclaimer.
All materials are internal planning artifacts and mockups. No taxpayer information or PII is included. Workflows were designed for implementation within the Pegasystems platform.
