Case study · Shipped, program ongoing
Section 508 as product strategy: Rebuilding Lincs, and the accessibility program that outgrew it
I led the ground-up rebuild of Lincs, a commercial monitoring platform: new information architecture, new UI, six personas from admin to end-user analyst. The accessibility work started there and became a company-wide program: audit, conformance roadmap, standards embedded in the design system, and issues now caught automatically at PR review. Target: WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508.
My role & the room
Role: Design lead. Led the foundational phase of the rebuild, set the direction, and established a clear handoff for continued execution.
Team: one other designer, four developers, an external accessibility specialist
Timeline: initial discovery and core experience direction, followed by implementation and an ongoing conformance program.
At PR review
accessibility issues are caught, with recommended fixes attached, before they ship
Ongoing
Accessibility conformance program advancing across the primary platform and related products.
The brief vs. the problem
The brief was a redesign. The real problem sat underneath it. Accessibility conformance isn’t polish. For government buyers it’s procurement, and increasingly it’s table stakes for commercial ones too. That makes it a revenue question, not a cleanup task, and it changes who should care: not just designers, but sales and leadership.
What the research found
The rebuild started with a usability baseline: a System Usability Scale score of 65 out of 100, and customer interviews that explained why. One customer put it plainly: “It’s very clear the product is a Frankenstein of apps built at different times by different teams.”
We went deep with five customer groups, about fifteen people, walking their real workflows end to end. Three themes kept surfacing: functionality, confidence, and efficiency. Users hit random error messages. Looking back through alert history meant a long trek through the product with little to show for it. Work got duplicated, frustration compounded, and the same steps got repeated across a team.
The tell was what people did when things broke: reload the whole product, log out and log back in, and hope. That isn’t a workflow. That’s a workaround culture — and the volume these teams handle was only going up.
Every design goal traced back to those findings: simplify workflows to cut cognitive load, make workflows consistent so confidence compounds, define personas and roles so the product is clear about who does what, and streamline the tasks dedicated users actually run instead of adding noise. We also scoped where AI could absorb the coming volume increase and tailor content to those personas.
The journey we designed for
I mapped the experience as five beats: comfort zone, trigger, crisis, recovery, better place. Users start in a comfort zone that works but wastes potential. A trigger — an alert, an error — tips them into crisis. They improvise a recovery and eventually get the work done, but the old product slowed every beat of that arc, in volume and in basic functionality. The redesign’s job was to shorten the distance between trigger and recovery, and make the better place the default — so the next trigger doesn’t knock them down as hard.
The five-beats workflow diagram — comfort zone → trigger → crisis → recovery → better place
What I did
Led the rebuild from kickoff: user research and interviews, a new information architecture, the three primary workflows, a usability baseline, and a roadmap and timeline built with the PM and engineering lead
Handed off clean: the second designer carried execution forward, including onboarding, account setup across six personas, and the remaining workflows, with the architecture and core user jobs already locked.
Structured the conformance effort: a full audit with an external specialist, a prioritized remediation roadmap, and tickets integrated into engineering sprints
Made it durable: authored the accessibility skill inside Design OS, so issues are caught during PR review with recommended fixes attached. Standards apply to every new build, not just remediated screens.
Scaled the program: established a conformance approach for the primary platform and a repeatable framework to extend accessibility across the company’s product portfolio.
Built executive alignment: when we demoed the design platform work, our CTO named accessibility the most strategic thread of it
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IA or workflow artifact
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Before-and-after of a remediated pattern
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The accessibility skill file
Results
Accessibility issues are caught at PR review, with recommended fixes attached, before they ship
Established a conformance program for the primary platform and a repeatable framework that can extend accessibility across the company’s products.