Timeline
February 2026 — present
Scale
£25m programme
4,000+ schools
Role
Interaction Design
Department for Education — digital infrastructure programme for schools across England
Leading interaction design on a major Department for Education capital grant programme delivering upgraded network infrastructure to over 4,000 eligible schools across England. A complex multi-stakeholder programme involving schools, suppliers, delivery partners, and DfE policy teams — requiring service design that works for every type of school and every stage of the programme journey.
A national programme at scale requires a portal that works for school business managers, facilities staff, and DfE administrators simultaneously — across legacy systems, within Microsoft 365 platform constraints, and to full GDS service standards. The Discovery phase needed to surface the full complexity of the service before any design began.
Full GDS agile lifecycle from Discovery: service blueprints mapping end-to-end journeys across all stakeholder types, ecosystem maps, and stakeholder analysis. GOV.UK Design System components adapted within Microsoft Power Pages constraints. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards applied throughout. Prototype built in HTML and CSS and tested with real users before development handover.
A working Power Pages portal prototype using the DfE Design System — complete user journeys, task flows, and screen flows — handed to development ready for build. Service blueprints and ecosystem maps providing the full programme team with a shared understanding of the service as citizens and staff experience it.
Relevance to Caribbean education programmes
Caribbean ministries of education are commissioning digital infrastructure programmes of similar scale — IDB and World Bank have jointly committed $512m to education digital transformation across the region. The same challenges apply: multi-stakeholder complexity, accessibility requirements, platform constraints, and the need to design for users across a large and diverse school network. Arallium brings direct, current delivery experience at exactly this scale.
Timeline
July 2024 — February 2026
Scale
87 live services
Multiple tax disciplines
Role
Interaction Design
HMRC — interaction design across 87 live tax services covering every major UK tax discipline
Working within HMRC's Digital Application Support Services across 87 live sites — a mix of legacy and GDS-built services — covering PAYE, Corporation Tax, VAT, Self Assessment, Stamp Duty, and multiple other tax disciplines. Plus a focused engagement within HMRC's View and Change programme, delivering a new dashboard for secondary agents submitting clients' tax returns.
HMRC's 87 live services span decades of technology — from legacy systems with complex workarounds to modern GDS-built services following the service standard. Each requires interaction design that serves taxpayers who range from accountants filing professionally to individuals completing their first tax return. The stakes are high: errors in tax service design lead to incorrect returns and compliance failures.
Full user journey prototypes designed and coded in HTML and CSS for testing across multiple iterations. In-depth user research conducted with taxpayers and HMRC caseworkers across each prototype iteration. GDS Discovery → Alpha → Beta → Live lifecycle followed on the View and Change engagement. GOV.UK Design System components applied consistently across all services — ensuring coherence for users who interact with multiple HMRC touchpoints.
Interaction design improvements across HMRC's live tax service portfolio. A fully functional dashboard for secondary agents submitting clients' Self Assessment returns — the first service to give agents clear visibility of submission status across their entire client portfolio. Full HTML/CSS prototypes handed to development with complete user journey documentation.
Relevance to Caribbean taxation programmes
Revenue authorities across CARICOM are digitising tax administration — e-filing platforms, taxpayer portals, compliance management systems. The design challenges are directly comparable: serving taxpayers with varying levels of digital confidence, designing for complex multi-party journeys (agents, businesses, individuals), and ensuring that digital services reduce error rates rather than creating new ones. Arallium's direct HMRC experience — across every major UK tax discipline — is a depth of tax digital expertise that no other Caribbean UCD consultancy holds.
Scope
Medical product experience
Trade show & digital activation
Delivered in
4 weeks
Role
User Research & Interaction Design
NHS — user research and interactive experience design for medical product adoption
User research and interaction design for an NHS-facing medical product programme, grounding a new digital experience in the real-world needs of clinical staff. Field research conducted with key decision-makers at a major NHS hospital — including a hospital manager, a consultant, and a pharmacist — to understand how medical products are used, evaluated, and selected in practice. Research findings directly shaped the design of a digital experience deployed across the UK and internationally.
Field research was conducted at a major NHS hospital over two days — interviewing clinical staff who were key decision-makers in medical product procurement. Participants were shown products they used daily and asked about their experiences, concerns, and unmet needs. Research covered safety, usability, sustainability, and specialist features across three distinct clinical roles.
""Bulkier packaging can be inconvenient. Lightweight, portable options are ideal for on-the-go needs.""
Primary concern: storage logistics and waste impact across wards
""Amcor's single-use sterile packaging minimises the risk of infection during procedures. It's a reliable safety measure.""
Primary concern: maintaining sterility in mobile clinical settings
""Clear labelling and easy-to-grip designs are crucial — making identification and handling straightforward, even when wearing gloves.""
Primary concern: speed and accuracy at point of dispensing
Creating a digital experience that could communicate the value of complex medical products to three very different clinical audiences — each with different priorities, workflows, and risk tolerances. The experience needed to work across trade show screens, email, and social media simultaneously. Delivered in four weeks.
Research → storyboard → architecture → wireframes → high-fidelity prototype. Field research with three clinical roles at Watford General Hospital identified three distinct priority clusters: storage/waste (hospital managers), portability/sterility (consultants), labelling/shelf space (pharmacists). Design architecture of 23 screens. Greyscale wireframes reviewed and approved before high-fidelity design in Figma with animation.
- 32% Click-through rate on interactive CTAs — vs. 2–5% industry average for static B2B slideshows
- 75% Video completion rate embedded in email — vs. 50–60% email average
- 8% Lead generation from social media shares — vs. 1–2% average
Relevance to Caribbean healthcare programmes
The NHS engagement demonstrates Arallium's approach to healthcare UCD specifically: grounding design decisions in field research with clinical staff rather than assumptions, designing for multiple distinct clinical roles simultaneously, and delivering measurably better outcomes than standard approaches. Caribbean health ministries investing in patient-facing and clinician-facing digital services require exactly this discipline — design that works in the clinical environment, not just on a designer's screen.
UCD leadership for Accenture and major technology clients
As Creative Director of Interactive Experiences at Accenture Song, Arallium led user-centred design for Google, Lenovo, Cisco, and Sage — managing a team of designers, copywriters, and researchers through full UCD processes: research, personas, user flows, wireframes, prototyping, and testing. This commercial design pedigree at global scale sits alongside the government sector experience, giving Arallium a breadth of UCD practice that specialist public sector consultancies typically lack.
Ready to discuss your programme?
Whether your programme is in education, taxation, healthcare, or any of our eight specialist sectors — book a free consultation to explore how Arallium can help.