Dana Chisnell
Dana is a pioneer and thought leader in civic design, bringing deep experience to that space. After working with banks, insurance companies, and tech companies for decades to improve experiences for their customers and workers, Dana takes that knowledge to the government space. She has applied this work in dozens of U.S. states, and even advised election commissions in other countries. In 2019, Dana was named one of the world’s most influential people in digital government by Apolitical.
Dana has had two stints at the U.S. Digital Service, where she was a founding user experience researcher. Both stints focused on digital transformation and process reengineering in immigration systems.
Dana spent a year experimenting through projects at Project Redesign (a project of National Conference on Citizenship), where she helped design the Tech Executive Leadership Initiative with the Tech Policy Hub and the Tech Talent Project. She was the first Executive Director for Customer Experience at the Department of Homeland Security, where she built the program and the practice from the ground up and institutionalized customer experience functions in DHS headquarters and six of the component agencies (CBP, CISA, FEMA, ICE, TSA, and USCIS).
She created the Field Guides To Ensuring Voter Intent. The Field Guides are 10 volumes of evidence-based design guidance covering topics from ballot design to website accessibility. The Field Guides are in the permanent collection at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Dana’s team at at the Center for Civic Design (2013-2020) was the first to map the experience of American voters. She worked on what is now is the basis of the digital user interfaces on most commercially available voting systems today.
For 4 years, Dana taught a field course on design in government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the Masters level Democracy, Politics and Institutions program. She was a Non-Resident Fellow in the Belfer Center Technology and Public Purpose Project.
For three years, she also taught with Whitney Quesenbery a course on design in elections that is part of the Election Academy at the University of Minnesota – the first university program to professionalize election administration.
Dana is an expert in plain language, forms design, and design for older adults. Her work on design for older adults includes groundbreaking work at AARP that was the basis for several requirements in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Dana and Jeff Rubin wrote the Handbook of Usability Testing Second Edition (Wiley 2008), the seminal book on the topic.