A Lean UX review transformed hundreds of issues into a prioritised investment roadmap.
Identified across design, content, accessibility, and mobile experience.
High-value improvements prioritised by viability, desirability, and feasibility.
Compliance-related issues identified and addressed through redesign recommendations.
Highest-priority improvements selected for proof-of-concept and roadmap delivery.
Applicants needed to resolve blockers quickly to avoid delays and lost opportunity. The service made that harder than it needed to be: feedback themes showed problems with usability, accessibility, mobile experience and process fit.
The stakes were not only experiential. Application delays created a risk to business revenue potential, and enquiries needed to reach the right team quickly to avoid processing delays.
The initial question was whether the experience could be improved through configuration and content updates. The review showed a larger pattern: the product had accumulated design debt that needed to be prioritised, not simply patched.
I was responsible for reviewing the current experience, identifying and categorising issues, shaping the prioritisation approach, and designing proof-of-concept improvements for high-value problem areas.
I worked with product, business and technical stakeholders to turn the findings into a roadmap that balanced customer value, business viability and build feasibility. I did not own final delivery decisions, but influenced roadmap and redevelopment conversations by making the scale, severity and trade-offs visible.
The review uncovered 422 opportunities. Treating every issue as equally urgent would have overwhelmed the team and made it harder to decide where limited budget and delivery capacity should go first.
I recommended ordering the backlog through a desirability, viability and feasibility lens. This separated high-value product improvements from lower-priority clean-up work and helped the team focus on the changes most likely to improve the applicant experience and support business goals.
The design direction needed to support two realities: a better future-state experience and an operational-state iteration that could work within existing constraints. Using Figma and a design system based on Fluent patterns, I needed to redesign components to address the accessibility issues and improve mobile compatibility.
The contact form review helped make the broader product issues tangible. It showed how content, interaction design, accessibility and responsive behaviour were combining to slow applicants down.
The obvious move was to keep improving the current service through configuration changes. That would have addressed some visible issues, but it would not have resolved enough of the accessibility, mobile and structural problems found in the review.
I used the prioritised findings to build a clearer case for redevelopment. The trade-off was that redevelopment required more stakeholder alignment and delivery investment. The benefit was a more honest path to meeting accessibility expectations and improving the service at the system level.
To make the best use of budget, I needed to prioritise the issues found in the design review. I used a desirability-viability-feasibility matrix to order the issues by business value and user experience impact.
The contact form exposed the product’s broader problems in one place: inconsistent content, inaccessible controls, mobile layout issues and hundreds of possible choices that made the experience harder to complete.
Instead of polishing the existing design, I redesigned the information architecture around fewer choices, conditional disclosure, clearer helper text and responsive layouts. This reduced the risk of omission errors and made the form easier to understand across desktop and mobile breakpoints.
The final designs were documented across mobile and desktop breakpoints, with each component annotated for responsive behaviour, spacing, and interaction states. This gave developers a clear implementation reference and reduced ambiguity during delivery.
Reusable components were organised into a shared Figma library with consistent naming, auto-layout properties, and token-linked styles. I also worked with developers during sprint planning to clarify design intent, resolve edge cases and keep the build aligned with the proposed experience.
The project turned a large set of isolated issues into a practical improvement roadmap. More importantly, it gave stakeholders a shared evidence base for deciding where product investment would have the greatest impact.
The biggest lesson from this project was that prioritisation can be as valuable as redesign. The issue list mattered, but the real value came from helping the team understand which problems were worth solving first and why.
If I approached this again, I would bring engineering effort estimates into the prioritisation process earlier. That would make redevelopment pathways clearer sooner and help stakeholders compare near-term fixes against longer-term product investment.
