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 experience strategy — most recently as lead designer on an AI-powered policy assistant available to 250,000 people. I build the teams, programs, and products that help big, complicated organizations empathize with the humans they serve.

See the work Start a conversation

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 government 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.

Available to
250,000
UI/UX owner
Sole
Stakeholder camps aligned
3

Read the case study

  1. 02

    A design system, not a folder of components.

    Design systems & scaling

    Case study in progress
  2. 03

    A design consultancy, built inside the government.

    Treasury CDS · Org design & leadership

    +24% / +40%Satisfaction · Production
  3. 04

    A Voice-of-Customer program, from zero.

    CISA · Research & insight infrastructure

    +33% / +19%Engagement · CX scores
  4. 05

    A services company’s first product.

    AIGINT · AI-assisted practice & speed

    Case study in progress

More work

  • Single Pane of Glass Enterprise HR platform · roughly 50,000 hours a year of manual lookup removed.
  • Identity Viewer Twenty systems collapsed into one lookup · a projected 190,000+ staff-hours a year returned.
  • CPC classification standards USPTO · taxonomy governance for the patent classification system.

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, and the practice I built now supports 24 programs and $70M+ in new design work at ECS — its CX/UX Center of Excellence, which I stood up from nothing.

  • I authored the career tracks and role definitions my designers are measured against — and coached six of them to promotion.
  • I hold interview veto across designer hiring: 21 hires in two years, about a third of the design staff.
  • At the U.S. Treasury I held delegated brand authority under Treasury Order 100-01, and wrote the department’s first Visual Identity Guidelines and Style Guide.

Read the Treasury CDS story Read the design-system story

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