The City of Philadelphia issued a call in June for a UX design fellow. Turns out the talent pool ran so deep they ended up choosing two people.

Kim-Thao Nguyen and Robert del Prado, two Philly-based UX designers, are the newest additions to the Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT).
According to city officials, the fellows will join the office for somewhere between four to six months. They’ll do design testing for the new Phila.gov and begin to “define the team’s human-centered design practices through independent projects, which might include language accessibility and public participation playbooks,” according to a posting from ODDT.
Here’s a quick summary of what earned each of them a spot on the team, according to info supplied by ODDT.

Kim-Thao Nguyen

• This graduate of the University of the Arts’ School of Media and Communication has worked with local and international nonprofits — like the Project for Nuclear Awareness and Philabundance — building awareness around complex subjects like human trafficking, foreign policy and hunger relief through the design of digital toolkits. She is currently an Internet Communications Coordinator at Independence Blue Cross.

Robert del Prado

• Prado, a design research and strategy consultant, also lives and works in Philadelphia. He is a former operations director, consultant and Chief Design Strategist with organizations like Mastery Charter and the NYC Department of Education. His UX chops come by way of General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive program. He holds a B.A. in English from Fordham University and an M.P.A. in public policy analysis from New York University.

The announcement of Nguyen and del Prado’s selection comes shortly after the city released 11 new and improved datasets from the Department of Licenses & Inspections, just in time for Code for Philly’s City as a Service Hackathon (CaaSH).
This release was a collaborative effort between L&I, the Office of Innovation & Technology (OIT) and OODT.