Michael Asaro — UX Strategist & Researcher

Selected Work

Design Systems

Civic Design System

Four USDA agencies had spent 8 years forking a shared design system — each going their own direction with no higher-level guidance about when to use what patterns, so every app worked differently. I set out to rebuild the documentation using the USWDS documentation site as a foundation, but their site was built for design system managers, not development teams. So I built a 107-page documentation site architected for busy development teams. It uses its own design system to demonstrate how every component will look with agency-level design tokens that can be applied in minutes. Then I open sourced it as the CIVIC Design System.

View Design System → View GitHub →

Figma mockups of the USDA Claribel chatbot interface

AI Product Design

USDA Claribel — GenAI Chatbot

A development team had a directive to "build an AI chatbot" for 2-3,000 pages of farm loan policy — but no designer, no product definition, and no clarity on what it should even do. I ran stakeholder sessions to define three user archetypes, assessed the AI product landscape, and designed the full mobile-first conversational UI from scratch: multiple personality modes for different user needs, document scoping filters, a citation system linking responses back to source handbooks, chat history, detailed feedback screens, voice input and text-to-speech for accessibility, and a desktop split-screen view pairing AI responses with ground-truth documents.

Service ecosystem visualization from NSF customer experience research

CX Research & Strategy

NSF — Customer Experience Transformation

NSF's internal services division wanted to improve service quality but had no way to measure whether their efforts were landing. Over two years, our team conducted 40+ stakeholder interviews, mapped a 12-stage service ecosystem across 11 systems, and built the measurement infrastructure — service typologies, journey maps, CX criteria, and scorecards — that gave leadership a basis for prioritization.

EdTech Product Under Construction

Bantr

A free learning companion for curious kids. Banter sits alongside YouTube and helps you go deeper into any video through conversation with AI — turning passive watching into active thinking. No grades, no assignments, no wrong answers. Just a good conversation about something you actually wanted to watch. Designed and built as a web app with plans to become a Chrome extension that lives inside YouTube directly.

Try the App →

About

I'm a UX strategist and researcher with 6+ years of experience across federal agencies including USDA, NSF, and SSA. I come from an engineering background — B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from Virginia Tech.

My method is iterative movement between strategy and tactics — define a strategy, plan the tactics, simulate the outcome to find the gaps, then revisit the strategy to account for what you learned. I think in complex systems, not linear flows, where multiple small interventions can reinforce each other and shift the whole pattern with leverage.

I'm a designer who builds, not a developer who designs. I've got years of experience doing interviews, observations, and market research. I take research insights and design in code — HTML, CSS/SCSS, JavaScript, design tokens — for usability testing. I work alongside development teams to intervene when the design meets technical constraints. I look far into the future to construct a strategy that leads to a shared vision.

Email LinkedIn GitHub