CASE STUDY UK Hydrographic Office
**UKHO**
UKHO is a world-leading organisation funded by the Ministry of Defence that sources, processes and provides access to marine geospatial data. Facing challenges around inconsistencies in functionality and brand, and a user experience which didn’t always align to the needs of their users, they sought to set up a dedicated user-centered design practice to build a design system that could be used by the new team and existing in-house developers.
Working with key stakeholders, including customers and marketing, we created a design system which is now being applied to all new product development within UKHO.
We designed with a diverse audience in mind, including tailored journeys for children and their guardians, for visitors to the UK, as well as an offline ‘assisted digital’ journey with phone support, a paper test and registration process. Supporting the service, we implemented an admin portal for call centre staff to support the new service. The system has informed digital sailing directions for marines, a tidal prediction service and the new UKHO website. User-centred design is now an established practice at the UKHO, with the creation of a growing design team deploying new ways of working that cut across departmental silos. The team play an increasingly central role in the organisation as it develops the next generation of ‘blue economy’ products.
Embedding a new design system with a Hackathon
Applying design thinking principles, our designers embedded themselves within the UKHO in Taunton in order to work closely with the product teams.
“Working alongside SPARCK to build a UX design practice to further the UKHO’s engagement with users, was strongly enhanced by their excellent work with the Design System and in communicating and engaging wider stakeholders in design thinking and placing the user at the heart of our products.”
– Dave Alexander, Lead UX Designer
The initial release of the design system was primarily focussed on the provision of a pattern library with basic front-end HTML and CSS code. However, we had already acknowledged that utilising a more comprehensive front-end framework would enable the design system to be used in the development of more powerful and complex digital products and services.
The design system was adapted to use Angular which was the UKHO’s preferred front-end framework. To ensure that the design system was fit for purpose, we ran a Hackathon with some in-house developers who really put it through its paces. This resulted in a list of improvements including the creation of a component library in Storybook to allow developers to experiment with components in isolation, and also the production of comprehensive help guides and documentation to help those developers not familiar with Angular to get up and running.
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