UK Government: myHub
A self-service platform replacing 8 tools across 29 government departments, built for the least digitally confident user.
What I built
Complexities
The Outcome
Reflection
The UK Government's Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL) was running on a patchwork of disconnected software. Employees made multiple calls to different departments just to manage basic HR tasks, leave requests, pay queries, onboarding. Each task touched a different system. Nothing communicated with anything else.
The result: hours lost every week per person, across hundreds of thousands of civil servants. The cost was enormous and almost entirely invisible, because nobody had ever added it up.
Working closely with SSCL's Centre Program Director, Carl Johnson, I led end-to-end UX design of myHub, a single self-service platform that unified multiple APIs into one coherent experience. One place to manage pay, leave, communications, workload, and shared documents.
I led user research across multiple departments, interviewing employees at different career stages. I designed the full information architecture, all core flows, and collaborated directly with engineers to understand technical constraints. The rollout strategy itself was a design decision — we introduced features incrementally, allowing users to build confidence gradually rather than overwhelming them from day one.
The biggest challenge wasn't technical, it was human. We were introducing a new platform to a workforce that ranged from digital natives to pension-age veterans who had never needed a web portal before.
Accessibility wasn't a compliance checkbox, it was the primary design constraint for every single decision. I designed for the least digitally confident user first, and everything else followed.
myHub was rolled out to 29 government departments. By the time I left Squiz, documented savings had reached over £300 million across three years, a figure cited in Squiz's own published case study.
That number didn't come from a conversion rate or an A/B test. It came from replacing an entire category of friction: the daily, compounding cost of a workforce fighting its own systems.
myHub taught me that the most consequential design work often looks like the least glamorous. No delightful animations. No viral moments. What there is: a system that hundreds of thousands of people actually use, that cost the taxpayer significantly less, and that treated non-technical users with the respect they deserved. That's the standard I've held every project to since.