Unifying national public services
I take many separate government platforms and turn them into one simple system that has to work for everyone in the country.
Government services grow one portal at a time, so a citizen ends up facing dozens of sites with their own logins. I unify those platforms into one coherent system and build the shared design foundations used across national e-governance services.
- Role
- Product designer
- Years
- 2025 to present
- Scope
- Platform unification and shared design foundations
- Client
- Unnamed, as the work requires
Before
Error 422: invalid input
SubmitWhat broke, and what to do, are both missing. Everything typed so far is lost on retry.
After
A pincode has 6 digits. This has 5.
ContinueSays what is wrong in plain words, points at the field, and keeps every other answer.
The problem
Government services grow one portal at a time. A citizen ends up facing dozens of different sites, each with its own login and its own idea of what matters. For someone on an old phone with a weak signal, using the internet for the first time, that sprawl is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between getting help and giving up.
What I did
I unify sprawling public-sector platforms into single, coherent systems, and build the shared design and component foundations used across national e-governance services, so common features are built once and reused everywhere. The client stays unnamed, as the work requires.
The hardest part
The hard part is never can we design it. It is getting many owners to agree that the user's priority outranks each team's priority. Every organisation wants its section first, framed its way. Unifying them means telling each one that its corner is changing for the good of the person actually using it. That fight is political, not visual, and it is most of the job. Why it is political: Simplicity is political, not visual, an essay
What I design first
The error state. I start with what the screen says when something breaks on a slow connection, because on a public service that is the moment a citizen decides whether to trust it or walk away. Built for old phones and people with little practice online. Why I start there: The error state, an essay
- Her namesaved on this phone
- Her villagesaved on this phone
- Her bank accountwaiting for her