C. M. Yates & Kompany

Christopher Yates · Design leadership · Washington DC

Everything is a
design problem.

(So you came to the right place.)

I’m a design leader working at the front edge of AI experience — most recently as lead designer on LEDGER, an AI policy assistant used by 250,000 people. I build the teams, programs, and products that help big, complicated organizations empathize with the humans they serve.

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Selected work

Good design tells a story.
Here are a few of mine.

Case-study content in progress — redacted flows & wireframes to come.

Fig. 01 — Flagship · AI experience design

Designing trust into an AI assistant for 250,000 people.

Sole UI/UX owner for a DHS policy chatbot. Usability testing with policy knowledge-workers proved that source transparency and response precision were non-negotiable — findings that reshaped the interaction model, drove architecture changes to support multi-turn conversation, and produced a CRIT-based prompting guide that doubled as the UAT test suite. I built consensus across a skeptical coalition of policy, legal, and executive stakeholders — and shipped.

Users served
250,000
UI/UX owner
Sole
Stakeholder camps aligned
3

Read the case study

  1. 02

    A design consultancy, built inside the government.

    Treasury CDS · Design leadership & org design

    +24% / +40%Satisfaction · Production
  2. 03

    A Voice-of-Customer program, from zero.

    CISA · CX strategy & research

    +33% / +19%Engagement · CX scores
  3. 04

    One place for 260,000 people’s data.

    Agency HR platform · Product & AI

    260K / ~50KUsers · Hours saved/yr

How I lead

I care about you, and I want to hear your story. I ask a lot of questions, of a lot of people. I focus on people and process—then results. (…and of course, I make the results pretty.)

Today I mentor 20+ designers and researchers, support two dozen programs, and have grown $70M+ of new design work at ECS — building its CX/UX Center of Excellence from the ground up.

What I’m good at

Forrester CX Master · Prosci Change Practitioner · Partnership for Public Service Fellow · 20+ years in and around DC.

Before all this, I made complex things beautiful.

NASA books. K–12 textbooks. A Treasury strategic plan people actually used. Twenty years of craft under the leadership.

See the craft