Military Sealift Command Online Application

What existed before was a single long form, with no account behind it and no saved state. A candidate part-way through a federal employment questionnaire could lose everything to an idle browser tab. The stakes are high: applicants are warned that a false statement may cost them the job, end it after they start, or mean a fine or imprisonment under Title 18. Asking someone to get that right in one sitting, with no saved state, is a design failure with legal consequences.

The work began with process mapping: what the federal hiring sequence requires, in what order, and where a candidate can stop. That produced the central structural decision. A candidate creates an account, and their answers persist across sessions as a durable record, so the application can be finished over days rather than in one sitting.

The reference point was TurboTax, for the same reason TurboTax exists. The tax code will never be user-friendly, so the product stands between a person and the bureaucracy and walks them through it. Federal hiring is the same shape of problem.

The entry screen states the legal exposure in plain language, and the button that begins the process stays disabled until the applicant has read and agreed to the Conditions of Employment. The truthfulness requirement appears twice, at the top and in the footer, because it is the one instruction with criminal exposure behind it.

Help sits on the first screen: a knowledge base, a support request path, and the CIVMAR Support Center's phone, toll-free number and email, all visible before a candidate commits.

I designed the whole application in 2019, after I went back to MediaCross as VizVid went to market. The entry screen went live much as I drew it: the navy rail with the command's seal, Start the Process, the consent gate. The screens behind the login are the rest of the design.

A first visit explains what the candidate is building, a professional resume and the official application, so they will not have to type it twice. Openings list each position with its salary and when it opened. Applications shows every one a candidate has sent with its status in the command's own words, from Forwarded to Not Selected, each with the sentence that explains it. The knowledge, skills and abilities questions, the longest answers in a federal application, are saved one at a time with a checklist beside them. Support is a rail item on every screen.

The application went live by April 2020: the Internet Archive's captures run from April 4, 2020 through 2023, and its stylesheet was reissued through at least 2025. Its system is measurable from the shipped artifact: a 10px root, Montserrat, and an eleven-color palette with two values reserved for state, a red for errors and an amber for warnings, plus a seven-step progress bar for the stepped flow.

No completion or drop-off figures are in my files. What cannot be shown here is the old form itself: its assets survive in the Internet Archive, but no capture of its markup does.

I would ask for the one number the design was for: how many candidates who start an application finish it. The structure says it should have risen; nothing I kept says by how much.