Designing for clarity and trust case study

Turning a complex eligibility check into a clear, dependable workflow

A redesigned due diligence tool for the UK Cabinet Office, built with GOV.UK and Salesforce to support confident, high-stakes decisions

service design

gov.uk

design systems

accessibility

product and service design lead

Designing with confidence in mind

Product and service design lead (research, service flows, interaction design)

Transformed a complex due diligence process into something calmer, clearer and build-ready in four weeks

Context

Users relied on a clunky tool that introduced friction and reduced confidence. The existing workflow lacked clarity, feedback and consistency

The challenge: high-stakes decisions needed something traceable, consistent and dependable

Brief

Four-week engagement with the Cabinet Office to build a due diligence tool inside GOV.UK and Salesforce

Move a research wireframe into a clear, compliant, build-ready prototype that users could trust and developers could confidently build

Approach

Foundation

A rapid prototype exposed gaps early and set the structure for calmer user flows

Alignment

Grounded journeys in real user realities, aligning flows so everything felt consistent and intuitive

Iteration

Daily user testing shaped focused refinements, steadily strengthening the product with each iteration

Handoff

Successfully pushed for a design-engineering overlap so buildability issues were caught early, not at handoff

Outcome

Replaced uncertainty with a clear, test validated workflow

Strengthened alignment between policy, design and engineering

Delivered a solution ready for confident operational rollout

Fix issues in place

No more offline Excel fixes → errors resolved right where they happen

Success banner showing 13 additional records found after fixing failed bulk search results

Results that guide you

Grouped confidence scores → match certainty is obvious at a glance

Results table with blurred rows and coloured 8/10, 7/10, 6/10 and 3/10 match confidence scores

Streamlined result details

Richer results, clearer signals → next steps made unmistakable

Results screen with TO CHECK and NO INVESTIGATION NEEDED labels and match scores 12/100 and 73/100

Impact

Users didn’t need more features, they needed more confidence

"I spent hours trying to manually fix records in an Excel file. If I could've done it like this, it would've saved me a whole load of time"

A user in testing

Four weeks to build-ready

A user-tested prototype, verified with devs to ensure it could be built

Built for every user

Happy, unhappy and edge cases covered, with flows shaped to work consistently across WCAG AA and Salesforce standards

One system, many teams

Clear, cohesive journeys designed to support multiple Government Departments and Arms Length Bodies with confidence

What was built

Validated service flows ready for GOV.UK and Salesforce build

Smart search

Search patterns streamlined for single and bulk lookups, with inline results

Confidence scoring

Visual indicators showed result reliability, helping users prioritise with certainty

Built-in documentation

Observation fields supported traceability, replacing side spreadsheets

Tested in real time

Every state and journey tested in prototyping, shaped to work in Salesforce

Design decisions

What guided the design

Evidence-first decisions users could verify, so every outcome could be traced back to the data behind it

Accessibility as the quality bar (WCAG AA), ensuring the system remained usable across assistive technologies and high-stakes investigative workflows

Edge cases stabilised before the main journey, so complex scenarios did not break the primary flow

Trade-offs

Consistency over endless flexibility, especially across data-heavy screens where variation would create confusion

Clear structure over dense data complexity, helping investigators interpret large volumes of case data quickly

Operational clarity over feature flexibility, ensuring the system remained dependable in daily use

Deliberately omitted

Features implying certainty without evidence, which could undermine user trust in the decisions produced

User customisation that weakened consistency or traceability, making outcomes harder to verify

Automation before signals were trustworthy, avoiding decisions that appeared confident but lacked reliable data

Learnings

Clarity and traceability build confidence under pressure

Trust

Design for trust, not just task completion

More context, confidence signals and recovery paths calmed users working under scrutiny

Constraints

Constraints can sharpen the product

GOV.UK, WCAG and Salesforce limits pushed clearer hierarchy and reusable, safe-to-roll-out patterns

Prototyping

Prototype to think, not just to deliver

Realistic flows under pressure exposed gaps early and steered daily iteration

Accessibility

Accessibility is a design decision, not a checklist

Contrast, focus and structure made complex due diligence readable and defensible