Noah Kunin, Dan Munz, John Yuda, Consumer Financial Protection Board

About the Keynote
After the 2008 financial crisis, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was tasked with redesigning the disclosures that millions of consumers and lenders use to make smart decisions when shopping for a mortgage. Rather than conducting this process behind closed doors, Noah, Dan, and John led the Bureau to tackle it through collaboration – not only with other teams at the CFPB, but also other government agencies and the public.  Redesigning mortgage disclosures...in public?! Yes. 

The Know Before You Owe campaign marked the first time a federal agency embarked on an open, iterative, digital crowdsourcing initiative to improve consumer disclosures. Not only was this a huge step forward for how government agencies approach a user-centered problem, but the team learned about how to make crowdsourcing useful, what happens when mortgage disclosures get big on Twitter, and how working together was a much more effective way to convince lawyers and policy folks that collaborative and iterative design with the public is a good idea in the first place. In the end, Know Before You Owe built a stronger design that was more accepted by the mortgage industry, and a team that better understood how to work together.

Noah, Dan and John will discuss how they built a user-focused design process at a federal agency, and what UX leaders anywhere can do to build this kind of collaboration into their project or organization.

About Noah
Noah Kunin works for the Technology + Innovation team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He serves as the Technology Portfolio Manager for Supervision, Enforcement, and Fair Lending and was until recently the portfolio manager for Consumer Education and Engagement. He works with a hybrid team of user experience designers, developers, policy experts, and external stakeholders to figure out the best ways that technology can serve the mission of the Bureau. Currently he is working on a complete overhaul of the Bureau's supervision system. Previously he worked on projects and campaigns that help empower consumers to take more control over their economic lives and facilitate participatory policymaking - examples are Know Before You Owe and Paying for College.

Prior to CFPB, he worked for the Sunlight Foundation, working to visualize government data and make it actionable for interactive platforms.

About Dan
Dan has nearly a decade of experience building digital strategy into civic causes, political campaigns and federal agencies. In his current role, he leads strategic planning for the Bureau's digital properties, coordinating a multidisciplinary team and guiding key initiatives to success on the web. He led product development for the Bureau’s "Know Before You Owe" campaign to build an open, iterative design process into mortgage disclosures.

Prior to working at the Bureau, Dan helped found the Center for Excellence in Digital Government at the U.S. General Services Administration. There, he led product development for challenge.gov, recognized by Harvard’s Ash Center as one of the Top 25 Innovations in Government.

Dan is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife.

About John
John Yuda is a user experience designer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While at CFPB, he has focused on fostering collaboration internally among a team of 30 remote employees as well as externally through projects such as Know Before You Owe.

Before joining CFPB, John worked on bringing micro-targeting concepts to television advertising at Changing Targets Media. He has also worked extensively with non-profit organizations, universities, and other government agencies in his more than 15 years experience in design.

John resides in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and daughter.