2023

UX/UI

I led the design of the Northern Ireland Retail Movement Scheme (NIRMS) whilst working at The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as a consultant designer.

The challenge

As part of Brexit, the UK had to negotiate with the EU how goods would move from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. The result was the Windsor Framework agreements, and the creation of 'red lane' and 'green lane' movements between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NIRMS is the part of the green lane that now allows the seamless movement of retail food products, thereby ensuring food security in Northern Ireland. With a hard deadline of 1st October 2023, this new service had to be fully functional to replace a temporary scheme that could not be prolonged for legal reasons.

I joined a newly formed Scrum team in February 2023, and therefore had less than 6 months to research, design and implement a brand new service. There was no luxury of a discovery or even an alpha phase.

Mapping user journeys for the service

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The process

As a user centred design team, we prioritised validating the highest risk aspects on the service, whilst rapidly fine-tuning the design of the lower risk elements. This way, we could feed some designs to the developers to build, whilst giving ourselves the maximum buffer to test and iterate the elements most subject to change. We were able to affect ongoing policy decisions based on insight from traders collected during user research sessions. The service underwent a successful internal GDS Beta assessment.

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The outcome

The Northern Ireland Retail Movement Scheme has been rolled out smoothly and professionally for businesses since 1 October and provides a secure basis to protect GB-NI retail agrifood movements, including in the event of further GB-EU divergence on food safety standards

NIRMS nominated in the Government Project Delivery "Digital and Transformation Project of the Year Award" 2023.