Interview with Senongo Akpem, VP of Design and Research at Nava PBC

Why are you sponsoring Shift UX?

Human-centered design for government doesn’t get enough airtime in the broader UX conversation, and I’m on a mission to change that. I work in civic tech, where teams design the software governments use to deliver programs like unemployment benefits, paid family leave, and health care. It’s some of the most consequential design work happening right now, but many designers are unaware because it happens outside the product and startup world most conferences cover.

Nava, where I lead design, exists to make federal, state, and local government services work better for the people they’re meant to serve. The scale here is usually bigger than what you’d find in consumer product design: since 2015, our work has reached over 50 million households. That means research with hundreds of participants in vulnerable populations, service design across fragmented systems spanning multiple agencies, and increasingly, AI-assisted work built for caseworkers—grounded in more than 75 research sessions with the caseworkers and families who use it. Scale like this requires the sense-making and big-picture thinking that comes with modern human-centered design work.

Sponsoring Shift UX is how we put that perspective in front of a community that’s shaping where our practice goes next.

What excites you about the future of UX?

What excites me most right now is the blurring that’s happening to design roles everywhere, and how it’s creating opportunities for designers to become domain experts across a wide variety of services and products.

Designers working in government digital transformation are increasingly the ones who understand a problem end to end: not just the screen in front of them, but the policy rules behind it, the legacy technology it works with, and the people it’s meant to serve. That deep knowledge makes every team they work on faster and more credible. In the near future, that looks like a designer who’s spent years understanding how a specific federal government benefit works, and becomes the person everyone turns to because they know where the real levers are when designing for change and impact. We design for public benefits and safety net programs that affect millions of people, and I want to help other designers navigate the incredibly complex decisions that come with that kind of responsibility, even as boundaries between roles collapse.

AI is another exciting dimension of the future. The standards for what responsible, well-designed, AI-assisted work looks like are still being written, and whoever writes them first sets the bar for everyone else. I want the designers I work with to be leading this instead of getting stuck following rules someone else wrote.

What's the biggest problem you foresee for UX as a practice, and how should we address it?

A decade ago, simply having designers on your team set you apart. Now, every consulting firm, every big tech company, every AI startup can say “we have a design team.” If our profession can’t actively prove its value to the business and to customers, it gets treated as interchangeable, called “pixel pushers,” or relegated to pure craft and surface-level decisions.

In civic tech specifically, design teams can avoid this trap by talking fluently about agency outcomes, policy, and impact across their projects, constantly moving closer to the real challenges our clients are trying to solve. That also means investing early in the “boring” infrastructure: shared templates, patterns, and ways of working that hold up across various state and federal programs serving tens of millions of people. We invested in design ops at Nava years before we needed it, specifically so it wouldn’t be a crisis later. Now, since so much of the groundwork is laid, we have more opportunities to become domain experts.

What is it like working in UX/design/research/product at your company?

Nava runs a wide range of programs across federal and state governments. On the Federal Health side that’s partners like HHS, CMS, and CDC. On the Federal Civilian side, it’s partners like OPM and DOJ. On the State side, we are focused mainly on benefits delivery, so programs like paid family and medical leave, unemployment insurance, integrated benefits systems, and so on. All those different programs, partners, and agencies also means a wide range of team sizes and structures.

As a designer here, you’re working at the intersection of policy, technology, and human need, often on programs that affect millions of people trying to get help they’re entitled to. The work really matters. Design is part of our Delivery Org, so you’re working agile, cross-functionally with engineering, product, and program counterparts, constantly looking to ship value quickly and build trust with clients. One quarter you might be untangling how a benefit program’s policy needs to be implemented for caseworkers that administer it. The next you’re running an accessibility spike to hit federal compliance, or cleaning up a design system. It stretches what it means to be a designer, content strategist, or researcher.

Because of that, what you focus on at Nava can be quite dynamic: people move from owning one worksteam, to being the person other teams call because you understand a whole domain area, to eventually mentoring the next group coming up behind you. You’d be joining a team of over a hundred designers, researchers, content strategists, and front-end designers, so there’s tons of depth to lean on.

How would you describe your company's culture, who would new employees work with, and who champions UX at your company?

Human-centered design has always been core to who we are at Nava. It’s part of our value proposition to our government partners. To support this, we have a number of communities of practice built around craft: content strategy, front-end, trauma-informed design, developer experience, and more. Designers doing similar work are able to get together and go deep on their specific focus.

Every month we run Design Salon, where designers present new ideas, program updates, cool new tools, or even workshop a talk they’re about to give externally. It’s one of the main places culture gets built and maintained. We’re also a Slack-heavy org, so channels like #ai-design are quite active right now, with people sharing AI tips, tools, and reading material in real time.

As VP of Design, I ensure human-centered design is championed at the executive level, alongside our executive team, but really it’s our senior and principal designers who are the ones setting direction on client projects and building a design culture on their programs. As we’ve gotten bigger, we’ve been deliberate about building that leadership layer, so we invest in things like training and mentorship programs for design managers, design leads, and ICs.

What else should our community know about you?

I’ve been a designer for over twenty years. Prior to joining Nava, I was Design Director at Constructive, a social impact design agency, and an art director at Cambridge University Press, where I led a global design team. The throughline has always been mission-driven, human-centered work.

I’m also the author of Cross-Cultural Design, a book on building culturally relevant, responsible experiences for a global audience. I grew up in Nigeria, lived in Japan for almost a decade, and now call New York City home. Living in constantly shifting cultural and physical spaces has shaped how I think about design and identity generally, not just in civic tech.

At Nava, I lead a design and research practice of about 110 people across dozens of programs, with roles like designer/researchers, content strategists, front-end designers, and communications designers all working to deliver on our mission. My role means collaborating with practice and program leadership to make sure our design and delivery teams are moving our clients’ goals forward, and building a differentiated, delivery-focused design team that supports Nava’s mission.

These days, navigating the design industry can be confusing. I want to build places where designers can grow their domain expertise, share their voice, and do work that matters.