Part of an enterprise-level SCRUM agile group, the Technology-Enablement team consists of a product owner, delivery manager, a developer, and myself as the UX/UI designer.

Transitioning to the public sector and stepping into a Senior UX/UI designer government design system role has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It has allowed me to apply the skills and knowledge gained from my 12-year career in the private sector, where I worked as a front-end engineer and UX/UI designer.

What I’ve enjoyed most, besides being part of a great team that’s responsible for laying the foundations of digital design for the NSW government, is the big impact that small changes make - each design decision is critical and potentially impacts millions of people.

Even though product design remains at the heart of everything, there is a greater emphasis on long term outcomes and prioritizing which opportunities are more important than others as opposed to delivering outputs (such as new components). Everything operates at a higher level of abstraction focusing on reusable bite size chunks.

My day to day involves auditing NSW government websites, responding to questions around brand compliance and the design system building blocks, gathering feedback and measuring engagement on our community platform, evaluating ideas, designing and writing documentation, and aligning with the branding team and other adopted NSW design systems.

Challenges and moving forward

Our customers are external NSW government agencies, who manage their own websites. Being open source also adds complexity to measuring success, so increasing engagement so that we can grow in a healthy way, avoiding unnecessary bloating of the system at all costs is crucial for us.

One way to evaluate potential ideas.

The Backlog before and after the evaluation.

My time is also distributed with designing various parts of the Digital NSW website, including the recent redesign of the homepage.