Transitioning to the public sector and stepping into a Senior UX/UI designer government design system role has allowed me to apply the skills and knowledge gained from my 12-year career in the private sector - where I had the opportunity to work both as a front-end engineer and UX/UI designer.

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. We build, support, and maintain the essential building blocks for NSW government websites. Each small change that we make has a significant impact, with every design decision being crucial and potentially affecting millions of people.

Even though product design remains at the heart of everything, there is a greater emphasis on long term outcomes and prioritising opportunities as opposed to delivering outputs (such as the creation of new components). One of our main priorities is on accessibility and everything operates at a higher level of abstraction focusing on reusable bite size chunks.

Key responsibilities

• Leading user experience including supporting and maintaining the NSW Design System Figma UI Kit Library.
• Providing service and support to 48 product teams and assessing and prioritising our backlog and customer wishlists.
• Auditing customer websites to identify improvement opportunities.
• Encouraging and measuring engagement on the NSW Digital Community platform.
• Validating or invalidating new additions to the system.
• Evaluating designs through usability testing.
• Writing documentation on various design system components and core guidelines.
• Actively engaging with branding teams and other adopted design systems across the NSW government.

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Below is a point system to help us objectively assess and rank items in the backlog, so that we can focus on those that deliver the highest value. It serves as a starting point when discussing within the team as well as considering other factors such as:

• Optimizing or innovating
• Is it a business requirement from branding and/or accessibility teams?
• Has it been requested multiple times?
• Is it unique, or do we have something similar already?
• Does it apply to the whole of government (WoG)?
• Has it been flagged for accessibility?

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