Case study / Public-good greenfield

A high-traffic public benefits search platform built greenfield

Engagement: short-term, deliveredSector: UK third sector / public goodAudience: Members of the public

A UK charity needed a public-facing greenfield platform to help people find and calculate the government benefits they were entitled to. High-traffic, high-stakes (the audience was often in financial difficulty), with usability that had to land for users at the worst end of digital confidence. We led the design and architecture of the platform from scratch, with usability research feeding back into the build cycle.

The brief

A national charity in the social-support space wanted to put a benefits-eligibility search and calculation tool in front of the general public. The aim was simple: someone struggling to make ends meet should be able to find out what they qualified for without needing to be a benefits specialist. The execution was harder. The benefits system is complex; the audience often anxious, sometimes time-pressured, frequently using the site on a phone in difficult circumstances.

The platform had to be greenfield, high-traffic capable, mobile-responsive, and shaped by real user-experience testing rather than designer instinct.

Architecture and design

Greenfield architecture for a high-traffic public site. Mobile-responsive front end with customisable theming. Search and calculation engine for eligibility against the layered rules of the UK benefits system. Performance budgets set for the realistic worst-case user (older device, slow connection, high stress).

Usability-driven build cycle

External user-experience and usability testing fed back into the design across iterations. Designs that tested poorly were redesigned, not defended. The audience for this platform was not a UX researcher's typical participant pool, and the build cycle had to take seriously that an actual user might be frightened, distracted, or angry when they reached the screen.

Agile cadence under a public-launch deadline

Daily scrum meetings, two-week sprint cycles, code and performance reviews. The launch was tied to the charity's communications calendar, so the cadence had to land working software at the schedule the organisation had committed to externally.

The outcome

  • Greenfield public benefits search platform delivered against the public-launch deadline.
  • Mobile-responsive front end shaped by external usability testing rather than internal opinion.
  • Architecture sized for the high-traffic spike the launch and ongoing media coverage would generate.
  • Audience-first build cycle: poor usability test results triggered redesign, not defence.

What we learned, applied across our other work

The hardest user is the one in distress. Designing a public-facing tool for people in financial difficulty taught us a usability bar that most enterprise software never has to meet. We carry that bar into every customer-facing product.

External usability testing pays back its cost in the first iteration. Internal opinion about user-friendliness is almost always wrong.

Public launches are public; the deadline is real. The Agile cadence has to be honest about what will be in the launch and what will not.

Tech stack

Front end

MVC4 RazorjQueryMobile-responsiveCustomisable theming

Back end

C# / .NETEntity FrameworkUnit-of-Work repository pattern

Quality

ReSharperRedgate Performance Profiler

Methodology

AgileScrumExternal UX testing

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