Online Portal - Images sanitised for confidentiality

My role

I worked as a UX/UI design co-lead on a large-scale digital platform, working end-to-end across discovery, design, validation, and delivery and representing the UX discipline across cross-functional teams. This role involved close collaboration with business and technical stakeholders, translating complex requirements into clear, usable digital experiences while adhering to government legislation and maintaining consistency across the platform.

Description

The platform supports complex and secure application submission and management workflows designed to serve a range of users with differing needs and responsibilities.

This platform includes:

• Customer portal, facilitating task management, business and services record management, user management, and complex application submission and status monitoring
• Staff portal on Microsoft Dynamics 365 for backend application monitoring
• Public-facing record websites illustrating the regulatory data from successful application outcomes

The problem

New regulatory and legislative changes meant that a LOT more people were soon going to be submitting applications to our client, but the PDF and paper forms that they were using weren't going to cut it. We needed to create an  application portal that would allow for a higher volume of submissions without dramatically increasing the assessment time.

We also needed to consider:

• Legislation
  • The application forms and the contents of the portal and public-facing record websites needed to adhere closely to complex government legislation
• Long and asynchronous user workflows
  • The users of these forms were organisations and services that needed multiple different people to be able to contribute to one application. Additionally, they may take months to complete one form, so the workflows need to allow for multiple editors jumping around to different parts of the application prior to submission.
• Staff and applicant communication
  • The staff assessing applications needed to be able to request for additional information and provide responses to the applicants
• Rushed project timeline
  • We needed to have the work completed at a compressed timeline due to legislative requirements, meaning we were forced to start design work before the requirements were defined. The client side of the team had also only recently been formed, leading to additional complexity during discovery.

The platform required navigating multiple user roles with varying permissions, highly structured data requirements, and legislative red-tape. 

How we designed for complexity

• Broke down workflows into clear, guided steps (as much guidance as possible!)
• Designed reusable patterns to ensure consistency
• Got creative with our UI to balance usability with system constraints and operational requirements.

In the end, we created a robust and scalable platform supporting complex workflows and data management processes whilst remaining as intuitive as possible.