From paper to digital

The real problem was opacity

The agency's finance operations had been running on paper forms for decades — physically routed between approvers, stamped, filed, archived. Approvals took weeks, and audit trails were manual. But the loudest pain wasn't the speed; it was the invisibility. Employees submitted a claim and then had no idea what was happening to it — was it sitting on someone's desk, awaiting a signature, rejected, lost?

So the system had to do two things at once. It had to serve finance officers processing claims day-in, day-out — and it had to serve every other employee in the organisation, people who submit a claim a few times a year and just want to see where it is.

The people who use a system every day need power. The people who use it twice a year need grace — and a clear answer to "where is it?"

Directing a team, shaping the system

I led a design team of three — myself plus two direct reports — through discovery, IA, interaction design, visual design, and hand-off. My focus was on direction, stakeholder alignment, and the shared design system that would keep the two interfaces coherent. The hands-on craft work was delegated to the team; my job was to make their work possible and consistent.

Compliance requirements were everywhere. Financial workflows, approval hierarchies, audit trails — each brought constraints that couldn't be designed around, only designed with.

• Directed and reviewed the design team's output across all phases — discovery, IA, interaction, UI
• Negotiated approval-flow changes with three finance directors who had competing requirements — final design accommodated all three delegation authorities without branching logic
• Design system & shared components built to hold two very different interfaces together — power-user and occasional-user — without fragmenting the brand or the experience
• User and stakeholder interviews with finance officers and general staff to map every approval path and exception
• Multiple rounds of usability testing with both user groups before sign-off
• Led training, change management, and onboarding — a paper-to-digital transition is only as good as the adoption around it, so the role extended beyond design into anything that improved the user experience from first login onward

Power on one side, clarity on the other

Finance officers got dense, information-rich dashboards — bulk actions, filters, shortcuts, exception handling. The design prioritised speed and flow over simplicity; power users reward density when they trust it.

End users got something closer to a form. Clear steps, generous labels, no assumed knowledge of finance processes. And — crucially — a live, visible status for every claim they've ever submitted. No more "where is it?" emails. Submit, track, done.

A shared design system held the two interfaces together — common components, tokens, and patterns so the experience felt like one product, not two glued together.

Every claim carries a visible lifecycle — submitted, in review, approved, rejected, paid. End users see a simple timeline; finance officers see the same trail with the added context of who touched it, when, and what action they took. The same data, surfaced differently for each audience — because transparency looks different depending on which side of the desk you sit on.

Adopted by thousands

The new system replaced the legacy paper process entirely. It's now the standard across the organisation — used by thousands of employees, with finance officers running their daily work through it and every other employee submitting claims through it directly. Approval cycles dropped from weeks to days.

"Finally, I can see exactly where my claim is."
— End user, post-launch