I'm a UX and design manager with 15+ years leading digital transformation across government and enterprise platforms. Most recently, I led a centralized 9-person UX and usability lab team supporting the Defense Health Agency, moving the practice from embedded designers to a shared-services model and helping the team deliver 50+ UX initiatives in a single program increment.
What I care about most is building strong design teams: setting clear standards, running design reviews and critiques, and helping designers grow, while staying hands-on enough to guide the work directly when it matters.
My work spans the full product lifecycle, from research and stakeholder alignment through wireframes, interactive prototypes, and scalable design systems. I founded the design system for the SEC's EDGAR Next platform, used by 20,000+ financial professionals, and that work contributed to a $5.6M contract expansion. I was also a founding team member of the USPTO design system. Accessibility (Section 508 and WCAG) is built into everything I lead.
AI is part of my everyday practice. I introduced AI-assisted workflows using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Figma Make for ideation, critique, and documentation, and built an AI-assisted reporting system that cut team status reporting from about two days to under five minutes.
Multilingual perspective
I bring a unique perspective to UX design: fluency in 5 languages (English, French, Farsi, Spanish, Italian) and lived experience navigating multilingual environments across France, Spain, the UK, Italy, and Switzerland. I'm currently learning Brazilian Portuguese and have basic Arabic comprehension.
Growing up across Europe, I experienced firsthand the challenges of language barriers, cultural context in communication, and the relief when interpretation works seamlessly. This isn't academic knowledge; it's lived experience that informs every design decision I make, especially for products serving diverse, multilingual populations.
This perspective has been invaluable in my federal work on platforms like Healthcare.gov (serving millions, including non-English speakers) and SEC systems (used by international financial professionals). I understand how to design for users whose primary language may not be English, and how cultural context shapes the user experience.
Based in Northern Virginia, I bring both government compliance expertise and private sector agility to every project. I'm open to full-time, contract, and consulting opportunities.
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anahitashafa