Laying the foundations: shaping DWP’s 2025 customer experience design strategy
Towards the end of my time at DWP, it was clear we couldn’t continue as we were. Fragmented journeys. Inconsistent practices. Design debt everywhere. We were trying to meet complex user needs with disjointed systems and ways of working and it was slowing everyone down.
We needed more than fixes. We needed a strategy that pulled everything together.
The problem we faced
DWP was aiming high with its 2025 vision but the experience of our customers and colleagues wasn’t set up to get us there.
- Journeys were fragmented – Users were dropped between services, channels and benefit lines with no clear ownership of their end-to-end experience
- Design wasn’t consistent – Different teams used different tooling, standards and approaches which created friction and duplication
- Delivery was slow – Research insights, performance data and feedback weren’t being surfaced or acted on quickly enough. Teams were stuck in loops
Without a shared approach to customer experience design, we were never going to deliver with the consistency or pace that people needed.
What I led
I created a comprehensive Customer Experience Design Strategy that brought clarity, direction and structure to how DWP could approach user experience across its services.
It focused on three areas:
1. Understanding and connecting journeys
Working with Shared Channels Experience and the Sign-posting team, I proposed a structured approach to mapping cross-service journeys from a user’s perspective, especially where services merged or diverged.
This work set the groundwork for:
- Seeing the whole picture across life events, not just policy lines
- Identifying points of duplication and reuse
- Supporting the blue zone transformation teams with real user journey data
2. Building consistency into practice
We couldn’t scale good design without shared standards. I developed:
- The Good User Experience Standard – A DWP-specific extension of the GDS Service Standard setting out what good should look like across accessibility, simplicity, joined-up journeys, proactivity, use of data and more
- The Design Manual – Capturing the methodology, principles and handrails that teams could follow to work in a consistent way
- An expanded DWP Design System – More than styles and components, it included validated reusable patterns aligned with user needs
- A House of Representatives – A cross-discipline roundtable I proposed to ensure that standards wouldn’t just be written, they’d be upheld and evolved over time by the people closest to the work
3. Creating the conditions for faster better delivery
We identified systemic blockers, whether it was tooling gaps, policy bottlenecks or feedback silos, and shaped the strategy to confront them. The approach:
- Operationalised how research and feedback should feed into design
- Set out how to increase delivery momentum without sacrificing quality
- Emphasised the importance of reuse, shared ownership and end-to-end problem solving
The reality
While the strategy was well received and gained traction at senior levels, it hadn’t yet been rolled out by the time I left. But the foundations were there, clear and practical and aligned to what DWP needed to do to deliver better outcomes.
More than anything, it gave the department:
- A shared vision of what good looks like
- A pathway to reduce design debt and accelerate delivery
- A joined-up framework that could unite policy, design and delivery
I didn’t get to see it through but I’m proud of what we created. It was bold, honest and built with the realities of a complex organisation in mind.