Four services ran four systems. Families paid for the gaps between them.
The Military Childcare Portal unifies the tools program staff use to enroll children, calculate subsidies, manage providers, and certify family programs across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. One shell, one family record, one design system — so a child's care is handled consistently no matter which service or station they land in. I led the UX strategy and design.
Every service solved childcare on its own.
Childcare parity across the services was a standing commitment, but the tools behind it grew up separately — different systems for enrollment, subsidies, and certification, each with its own login, layout, and copy of the data.
Staff who supported families across services had to learn several systems. A family's information lived in pieces. And whenever anything moved — a PCS, a new provider, a recertification — someone re-keyed it by hand.
Like most program software, these were built around processing the paperwork, not around the caseworker trying to get a family enrolled before the next duty day.
One shell, one record, many programs.
I framed it as a single platform — a shared JSAS shell with consistent navigation — and treated each program as a module inside it, drawing on one family record. Fields that used to be re-entered are pre-populated and read-only: staff confirm information, they don't retype it.
Everything followed from that: a subsidy calculator that makes a family's real cost explicit, a documented color system that lets each program keep its own identity without fracturing the platform, and an evaluation side that holds programs accountable in the same visual language.
What's actually different about how this works.
Cost you can actually see
Cost is where a childcare decision gets made or stalls. Parent fee, subsidy cap, billing cycle, and benefit resolve into one number — Total Parent Fee — on a single Calculate This. Staff get the family's real cost without a spreadsheet, computed the same way at every station.
Same inputs, same rules, every location — which is also what makes a subsidy determination defensible when it's later reviewed.
One system, every service its own home
The hardest balance: one consistent platform, but services and programs that take real pride in their own identity. A single neutral skin would belong to no one. I held the structure, navigation, and components constant and let identity live in a themed masthead — the same system underneath, a different front door on top.
A documented palette, not four moods
Those themes aren't ad-hoc. They draw from one defined system — a primary set plus secondary light and dark ramps — so every program stays coherent and legible, and a new module inherits the rules instead of inventing its own.
Built for accountability, in the same language
The same design carries the staff-and-leadership side. Program certification reads as a single grid: each standard marked Met, Met with Recommendations, or Not Met, with field evidence, team files, and comments in line, and progress visible at a glance. Filters narrow a long checklist to exactly what a reviewer needs.
Families never see this screen — but they feel it. Consistent evaluation is how parity stops being a slogan and becomes something leadership can actually see across the force.
Serving families well and serving the institution well are the same design.
Government-program UX usually treats this as a tradeoff — that audit-readiness and parity reporting require friction for the people doing the work, or that a humane tool means cutting institutional corners. Neither holds. The moves that make this system faster for staff — one record, transparent cost, a shared component language — are the same ones that make it consistent and defensible across services.
Staff get a platform they can actually move through. Leadership gets one view of parity and determinations that hold up under review. The family, downstream, gets care that doesn't reset every time they move. Same design, all three.
More work like this
I design for complex, regulated, real-world systems — health, finance, government, enterprise. If you have one that needs untangling, I'd like to hear about it.
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