Overview
Governments often rely on legacy digital transaction systems that have been built in an ad-hoc manner over time. This results in inconsistent user experiences, redundant maintenance efforts, and difficulty in scaling new services efficiently. TaPaaS (Transactions Platform as a Service) was initiated to address these challenges by creating a standardised, scalable, and modular platform for government transactions.
Business goals
- Uncap business capacity to take on new work, generating new revenue
- Reduce maintenance costs by 80%
- Increase speed to market by 50%
- Reduce cost of delivery to enable smaller agencies to go digital with Service NSW
- Deliver a consistent customer experience
- Increase velocity of design activities by 80%
Design challenges
From a design perspective, the core challenge in standardising government transactions was balancing consistency and flexibility. Government services vary widely in complexity, user needs, and regulatory requirements, making it difficult to apply a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution.
Transactions range from simple payments to multi-step applications requiring verification, document uploads, and approvals. A standardised framework had to accommodate variation without sacrificing usability.
While a modular system reduces redundancy and improves efficiency, agencies often need tailored experiences for their services. A balance needed to be struck, defining where flexibility was necessary and where strict standardisation was beneficial.
Citizens interact with multiple government services and expect a predictable and intuitive flow. Standardisation meant designing reusable patterns, structures, and interactions that worked across services, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Transactions range from simple payments to multi-step applications requiring verification, document uploads, and approvals. A standardised framework had to accommodate variation without sacrificing usability.
While a modular system reduces redundancy and improves efficiency, agencies often need tailored experiences for their services. A balance needed to be struck, defining where flexibility was necessary and where strict standardisation was beneficial.
Citizens interact with multiple government services and expect a predictable and intuitive flow. Standardisation meant designing reusable patterns, structures, and interactions that worked across services, ensuring a seamless user experience.
A legacy of inconsistency
When I joined Service NSW in 2019, the organisation was yet to establish centralised Design System. The Global Experience Language (GEL) was stood up sometime in the intervening years, and assisted us in creating that consistent experience that our customers expected.
However, throughout that period much work had been done. Additionally, while GEL provided essential building blocks, it did not accommodate for many of the specific use cases that we had throughout the years.
However, throughout that period much work had been done. Additionally, while GEL provided essential building blocks, it did not accommodate for many of the specific use cases that we had throughout the years.
The result was that many various design solutions had been implemented for similar problems, but without being recorded and supported as standards for future use or iteration.
Design goals
Working alongside leadership, I ran workshops to develop a strategy and roadmap with key goals and milestones that would enable us to deliver on our business goals.
Risk, dependencies and priority were establish, with the following steps defined and scoped with deliverables for horizons 1 and 2:
Risk, dependencies and priority were establish, with the following steps defined and scoped with deliverables for horizons 1 and 2:
- Identify inconsistencies in application of design solutions and UI
- Discern essential variability in design solutions from extraneous noise
- Determine best practice among multiple design solutions to same problem to deliver justified standard
- Document new standards with rationale, usage rules, anatomy etc.
- Create new robust Figma components facilitating ease-of-use for designers for all functions and variants, and referencing GEL directly to ensure alignment by inheriting updates over time
- Define and validate transaction categories to enable delivery of transaction templates, vastly reducing design efforts for new projects
- Create transaction templates
Templates
With the ultimate goal of transaction templates as our guiding star, other design leaders worked to define the constituent pages and steps that made up transactions and that would be populated by the standardised components.
Mazlow's hierarchy of standards.
Categories of transactions were defined. Theoretically, each category would have a corresponding template that would pre-define a set of steps and pages that would contain the specific components required for that category.
This would deliver on the business goals in the following ways:
This would deliver on the business goals in the following ways:
- Allow us to provide an estimate to potential client agency based on their transaction type categories
- Provide a specific requirements document to be filled by the client agency to fill out the knowledge gaps for the build quickly, saving time on discovery engagement
- Minimise design work to the lowest possible effort by providing a ready-built Figma design file with all components and their hierarchy in place, consistent and defined by our robust standardisation process and years of expertise
- Ensure all designs are consistent with the TaPaaS platform architecture, ensuring maintenance burden is minimised
- Ensure all components and flows implemented are consistent with our standards, providing an intuitive, seamless and trustworthy customer experience
The process
As lead designer on this tranche, I developed a process for us to follow, aligning to team dependencies and our timeline, and enabling asynchronous work for other design and development efforts.
Some process slides. Click to enlarge.
Audit
The team conducted an audit of approximately 20 transactions, analysing every UI component based on:
- Form (the UI component type)
- Function (its purpose in the user journey)
This helped identify consistent vs. inconsistent component usage, laying the groundwork for standardization.
Prioritisation
Findings were compiled into a heatmap, highlighting:
- Components requiring standardisation
- The effort needed for alignment
This allowed the team to prioritise components based on impact and effort.
Collation
Components were grouped based on shared functionality. This helped in defining core design patterns and eliminating redundancy under a unified standard
Design & Ratification
Designers compared UI variations using a heuristic framework to determine the ideal standard. Components were tested in all relevant contexts to ensure future-proofing. A design council reviewed and ratified the final components for consistency.
Documentation
Finalised components were documented in Figma templates, detailing:
- Variants, states, and use cases
- Do’s and don’ts for implementation
- Accessibility considerations
This ensured clear guidelines for adoption across all government services.
Click into the images to get some indication of project scope.
The outcome
Through this process, we have standardised approximately 160 components supporting 120 functions, consolidating them into about 30 core components with variants.
While development has yet to begin, we successfully met our goal within the deadline. This marks the first step in unlocking growth and revenue streams for our agency by cutting build time by 50% and capping maintenance costs, ensuring they remain stable as new agency transactions are onboarded.
Our next steps will be to validate our transaction categories and create the transaction templates with the aim of reducing the time and effort required for design and discovery activities by 80%
Our process and rationale are fully documented, and comprehensive handover materials are ready for developers to begin their work.
While development has yet to begin, we successfully met our goal within the deadline. This marks the first step in unlocking growth and revenue streams for our agency by cutting build time by 50% and capping maintenance costs, ensuring they remain stable as new agency transactions are onboarded.
Our next steps will be to validate our transaction categories and create the transaction templates with the aim of reducing the time and effort required for design and discovery activities by 80%
Our process and rationale are fully documented, and comprehensive handover materials are ready for developers to begin their work.
Next steps
