ORA & Retire Ready
Overview
This project is part of a presidential initiative to modernize the federal government’s digital infrastructure. Before the initiative, federal employees had to navigate complex paper forms to receive their benefits, which could take up to 7 months. The system now helps 2.3 million federal employees get their first paycheck approved in under 7 days, with no paperwork.
Retire Ready
Retire Ready is a pre-retirement tool employees can use months or years before officially retiring, reviewing service history, testing retirement-date scenarios, and fixing errors before they become blockers. For HR, it means fewer surprises and less noise to manage. It exists because 80% of delays in ORA's fastest cases traced back to one thing: incorrect military service records. Catching that early made instant retirements possible for far more people.
Simplifying without duplicating ORA. Retire Ready needed to ask nearly the same questions as ORA, but lighter, reliable enough for an accurate estimate, simple enough for someone a decade from retiring. Progressive disclosure and plain language let complexity scale up only when it's needed.
Knowing what to flag. Not every update matters to HR. An incorrect military service record gets flagged even ten years out, since it's the one thing that blocks an instant retirement later, but HR isn't pulled in over every minor suggestion from someone who isn't close to retiring. Contextual flagging like this cut down HR's workload significantly, and a pre-defined set of dismissal reasons kept every response consistent, replacing scattered chat messages and personal emails with something structured and easy to track.
The real challenge was designing for both sides at once: employees needed something interactive and easy to understand, while HR needed rapid-action forms built to get things done, not to be lingered over.
ORA
ORA is the platform federal employees use to officially retire, replacing the paper obstacle course with a step-by-step guided wizard on desktop and mobile.
