Marissa (Mars) Epstein
UX & Strategy Lead at Mars Digital
Marissa Epstein is a Strategy & User Experience Lead and Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC). As a consultant at Mars Digital, she serves government websites and mission-driven organizations.
Marissa’s (or “Mars’,” either’s fine) hybrid practice combines research, information architecture, content strategy, and accessible design—whatever it takes to wrangle complexity. She crafts workshops and systems that balance user needs with organizational goals.
Her work includes Iowa.gov and Mass.gov (both Government Experience Award winners), Family Planning 2030, Plan Bay Area, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation. She has spoken at DrupalCon, DrupalGovCon, World IA Day, and a dozen events nationwide. Based in Providence, RI, with her enormous dog. Find her pursuing food, music, and kitsch.
Components break when the content model underneath is rigid. Drawing on platforms serving 150+ government agencies and 14 million residents across Iowa and Georgia, this session walks through what determines whether a component system enables scale or becomes a bottleneck: field structure, required versus optional, granularity, and relationships.
You'll see the process: author workshops with component flashcards, data dictionary decisions (cardinality, character limits, display variations), and simplified specs embedded directly into Figma so designers can stress-test constraints before code gets written. You'll also learn how to encourage relationships over duplication so content stays consistent at scale without heroic maintenance.
This session is for content strategists, developers, site builders, and UX designers working with component-based systems.
Leave knowing:
- the pitfalls of modeling
- where guardrails belong
- how to validate before and during building
Structure doesn't restrict flexibility. It's what makes flexibility possible.