Jen Sepso
I’ve spent most of my 20 years in design working on complex systems where the problem isn’t defined yet. My work spans federal regulation, power-grid planning, healthcare, and education — domains where information is dense and requirements keep moving. That’s what I’m best at: learning an unfamiliar domain fast, finding structure in fragmented inputs, and making the consequential questions concrete enough for a team to reason about together. My current focus is workflow architecture, applied AI, and using prototypes to understand a product early.
Lead product design on enterprise platforms in regulated and technically dense domains: workflow architecture, applied AI, product definition, and rapid prototyping.
- Introduced rapid prototyping as a core practice on a next-generation clinical platform. It changed how the team explored requirements, weighed options, and reached product decisions.
- Built high-fidelity prototypes with AI-assisted tools and used them in sessions with clinicians, product, engineering, and executives. The prototypes surfaced unresolved logic and became a working tool for defining feature requirements while the product was still forming.
- Designed a connected federal examination workspace that pulls institutions, issues, evidence, workpapers, deadlines, and review into a single operating model.
- Turned contingency-analysis logic into usable workflows and interaction models for an AI-assisted power-grid planning platform while engineers and domain experts were still refining the technical model.
- Joined an education-platform project to finalize designs already approved for launch. Found structural and responsive problems in the system, presented alternatives, and argued successfully for a two-month delay to rebuild the product on a more scalable foundation.
- Developed two complementary methods: the Legibility Audit, which uses AI to test whether a prototype reads as intended, and Collision Prototyping, which uses prototypes to expose overloaded requirements. Shared both internally through talks and working sessions.
- Ran recurring design office hours for federal client teams on product audits, systems thinking, and design systems.
Maintain an independent product and design practice alongside full-time roles, now focused on selective client work.
- Directed 100+ engagements from early strategy through production, working with client leadership while staying hands-on in design.
- Assembled small cross-disciplinary teams around each project, drawing on design, development, writing, and production.
Creative lead for civic information and voter-engagement products serving New York City voters.
- Led the NYC Votes website redesign, translating the voting process into an interactive model for voter education.
- Designed and delivered the multilingual NYC Voter Guide, distributed to more than 8.6 million residents in five languages.
- Built reusable production systems that shortened delivery cycles and held accuracy across digital and print.
- Applied WCAG accessibility standards across public-facing civic information, including materials for audiences historically underserved by standard civic communications.
- Directed the company rebrand and mobile product redesign, contributing to a 223% increase in mobile sales.
- Improved information architecture, conversion flows, and mobile usability in close partnership with engineering.
- Managed digital programs with budgets up to $500K across more than 35 clients.
- Led responsive redesigns of legacy websites from concept through launch.