Context

A central platform is used to receive and route formal documents linked to ongoing work across government teams. These documents carry operational and legal weight, and need to be handled quickly and correctly.

Over time, the system became fragmented. Teams relied on workarounds and local knowledge. This led to:

• Documents being missed or misrouted

• Unclear ownership and next steps

• Inconsistent usability and accessibility

• Heavy reliance on individual experience

My contribution

My contribution

I led design across three product groups, six engineering teams and six designers. My hands-on focus was the document inbox and report-viewing experience, using research, workflow mapping and interaction design to help users assess and act on documents.

I led discovery with operational and policy stakeholders, set the experience direction and worked closely with product and engineering to align decisions across the wider journey. I also established shared interaction principles and reviewed designs for usability and accessibility.

Key work

Understanding the whole journey

I expanded the work beyond the inbox to understand how documents reached users, who was responsible for assessing them and what happened next. Research with operational and policy stakeholders, supported by workflow mapping, made the dependencies and gaps in ownership visible.

This gave product, design and engineering teams a shared understanding of the journey and helped us address problems that an interface redesign alone would have left unresolved.

Making assessment and action clearer

My hands-on focus was the inbox and report-viewing experience. I redesigned the information hierarchy and interactions to help users scan and prioritise documents, understand status and ownership, and identify the next action.

I used prototypes to explore approaches before development, grounding decisions in how people worked and the operational constraints they faced.

Creating coherence across teams

The experience depended on work delivered by six engineering teams across three product groups. I set a shared design direction and worked with product and engineering to connect decisions across those boundaries.

Shared interaction principles, design reviews and attention to usability and accessibility helped the teams deliver a more consistent experience while keeping the wider journey in view.

Outcomes

Assessment speed improved by 26%

In-app AWS analytics showed a 26% reduction in the time taken to grade a report following the redesign.

Clearer status, ownership and next steps

The inbox and report-viewing experience brought the information needed to assess and act on documents into a clearer structure, supporting more confident decisions.

A shared direction across delivery teams

Workflow mapping and shared interaction principles gave teams a common basis for design and implementation decisions, helping connect independently delivered capabilities into a more coherent experience.

Reflection

This wasn’t about redesigning a screen. It was about making an invisible system clear enough for people to trust and use properly.

The work sat across design, systems thinking, and team alignment. Getting that right mattered as much as the interface itself.

Confidentiality note

This project has been simplified due to the sensitive nature of the work.