Elliot RylandsThe self-service platform now used across 29 UK Government departments.
Led the end-to-end design of myHub, a unified self-service portal product deployed across 29 UK Government departments, including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice. The platform contributed to programme savings of over £300 million, and became the foundation SSCL extended into a follow-on portal serving 3 million UK veterans and serving personnel.
Day-to-day government work was happening across fragmented internal systems. HR platforms, procurement portals, leave requests, pension systems, IT support flows, each department had built, inherited, or patched together its own. The fragmentation was expensive, frustrating, and mostly invisible from the outside.
One self-service platform, deployed across departments, replacing disconnected internal tools with a more unified experience. Squiz was the technology partner, SSCL the digital partner, and I led the product design across the multi-tenant platform. The work focused on cognitive consistency, controlled flexibility, and design patterns that could survive years of rollout.
myHub deployed across twenty-nine UK Government departments, including the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice. Contributed to programme-level savings exceeding £300 million as part of SSCL's wider service delivery work. The patterns established later informed the Armed Forces Personnel Portal serving millions of veterans and active personnel.
A market of internal systems most people never see
In UK Government, a huge amount of day-to-day work still happens inside internal systems most people never see.
HR platforms. Procurement portals. Leave requests. Pension systems. IT support flows. Each department had built, inherited, or patched together its own version over time. A civil servant might jump between multiple systems just to complete a handful of basic tasks.
The fragmentation was expensive, frustrating, and mostly invisible from the outside.
SSCL, working as the digital partner to UK Government, set out to simplify that. One self-service platform, deployed across departments, replacing disconnected internal tools with a more unified experience. Squiz was the technology partner. I joined to lead the product design work already underway.
Who we were designing for.
myHub had to work for everyone from a Major running personnel admin from a deployed base to a payroll clerk at the MoJ. Four representative personas anchored every design decision.
Richard Jones
- Role
- Veterans Affairs
- Tenure
- 22 years service
- Tech
- Comfortable
Richard left the Army after twenty-two years and now coordinates support for veterans transitioning back into civilian life. He needs to find authoritative information quickly, often on behalf of someone in crisis.
- Find policy and entitlements without trawling intranets
- Submit requests and track them through approval
- Trust the answer he sends to the people he supports
- Same task lived in three different legacy systems
- No clear route to the right form or owner
- Internal language assumed years of institutional context
Margaret Francis
- Role
- HR / People Ops
- Tenure
- 11 years at dept.
- Tech
- Cautious
Margaret manages people operations for a regional government office. She moves between leave, pay, occupational health, and pensions for a team of around 80, and is the first port of call when something breaks.
- Reliable, repeatable workflows for routine admin
- Confidence that the data she's seeing is current
- One place to send colleagues for self-service answers
- Different colour and language in every tool she used
- Spreadsheets bridging gaps between systems
- Searches returned outdated PDFs and dead links
Annie Chaplin
- Role
- Policy / Strategy
- Tenure
- 4 years at dept.
- Tech
- Fluent
Annie advises on cross-department policy and lives on her laptop and phone. She moves fast, expects modern interfaces, and reaches for keyboard shortcuts before menus.
- Mobile parity with desktop for tasks she finishes between meetings
- Personalised feed of what's changed since she last looked
- Predictable search that surfaces the canonical answer
- Productivity tools that assumed she'd always be at a desk
- No notion of 'recent' or 'mine' across systems
- Friction that broke her flow mid-task
Kevin Arnold
- Role
- Operations / Logistics
- Tenure
- 30 years service
- Tech
- Functional
Kevin runs daily operations across a depot of around 200 staff. He prefers a single, clear screen and zero ambiguity. New tooling is welcome only if it removes work, not adds it.
- Big, scannable dashboards over deeply-nested menus
- Plain-English status: done, waiting, escalated
- A way to delegate or hand off without dropping the thread
- UI that hid status behind icons and tooltips
- Approval chains that lost notifications
- Training overhead every time a tool got 'modernised'
How might we…
The strategic questions we held the design against. Each one had to read as true for both a deployed Major and a payroll clerk at a desk.
Create a single point of access to information and services that works for desk staff, line managers, military personnel, and veterans alike?
Reduce the time and cognitive load of routine government admin without removing the rigour the work demands?
Improve cross-department communication without forcing twenty-nine teams onto identical screens?
Make the platform feel coherent at every altitude, search bar to deep workflow, even when departments brand it themselves?
Surface the right answer to the right person before they have to go looking?
myHub objectives.
We mapped target outcomes to user types and the paths between them. Each column was scored against the question above it as the platform evolved.
From landing to task complete.
The canonical happy path we designed for, with the branches we kept (chatbot, search) and the dead-ends we redesigned out (off-platform redirect, phone-to-vendor).
How the platform came together
Designing a product that had to survive variation
The challenge with myHub was never designing a single interface. It was building a platform flexible enough to work across twenty-nine departments without becoming twenty-nine separate products. Each had different workflows, integrations, approval structures, and internal language. The platform had to absorb all of it without losing coherence. Most of the work sat inside the interaction layer, navigation, form behaviour, state communication, shared workflows. The goal was cognitive consistency, not visual consistency for its own sake.
Making legacy systems feel replaceable
Integrating government systems is an engineering challenge. Making people trust the replacement is a design challenge. A lot of the research focused on understanding how civil servants already worked before myHub existed. Legacy habits, workarounds, spreadsheets, approval chains, internal language. The design language that emerged was intentionally restrained. Plain language. Repeated patterns. Predictable behaviour. If something needed a tooltip to make sense, the interaction usually needed simplifying instead.
Balancing consistency with departmental flexibility
Every multi-tenant platform eventually runs into the same tension. Too much control from the core platform and departments try to work around it. Too much flexibility and the system fragments into dozens of disconnected experiences. The solution wasn't unlimited freedom, it was controlled flexibility. Branding became a defined surface area via theming variables and structured identity controls. Workflow flexibility became composable patterns instead of bespoke one-offs.
Working inside a real partnership
myHub only worked because the relationship between Squiz and SSCL was deeply collaborative. Platform decisions weren't designed in isolation and handed over for approval afterwards. Product, delivery, engineering, and stakeholder conversations happened continuously across both organisations. A lot of senior product design work in environments like this becomes facilitation, translation, and maintaining clarity while complexity increases around the project.
Multi-tenant platforms succeed or fail on consistency people barely notice.
First six months.
The Gantt we held the original release against. Pre-discovery into beta testing into a contained Release 1 deployment, so we could shake out the multi-tenant complexity on one department before scaling.
Four cycles across two years.
Once the first deployment was stable, we moved to a four-cycle rhythm: each cycle began with a tight discovery, fed into design & build, and ended with a numbered release. The pattern survived through 29 departmental rollouts.
Foundations & first pilot
- Discovery: research, personas, IA
- Design & build of the core platform
- Internal pilot with one department
First production deployment, with the platform's interaction patterns and theming layer locked in.
Multi-tenant theming
- Discovery: departmental brand variance
- Theming variables, structured identity controls
- Onboarding the next three departments
Theming layer proven across four departments without breaking the shared component library.
Composable workflows
- Discovery: workflow & approval variance
- Workflow primitives, form behaviour, state
- MoJ and MoD onboarding
Workflow patterns abstracted into composable primitives, unlocking MoJ and MoD rollouts.
Scale & veterans extension
- Discovery: scale of veterans audience
- Hardening for high-volume veterans portal
- AFPP foundation work begins
myHub's foundations carried forward into the Armed Forces Personnel Portal serving 3M+ users.
From reactive to proactive.
The platform was originally built to keep up with departmental requests as they arrived: reactive, costly, slow. We re-positioned it as a proactive product whose tooling reduced overall build cost over time.
Reactively absorbing change. Time on design and build was costly and lengthy, with high willingness to change because the platform had no opinion of its own.
Through a proactive approach, we evolved the product against a single set of patterns, reducing overall build cost and the friction of every new departmental rollout.
Adoption across UK Government departments
The platform rolled out gradually across five years. From early pilot deployments to twenty-nine departments live by the end of my time leading the design at Squiz. The numbers below reflect the approximate trajectory of departments live on the platform year-on-year.
Shared interaction logic, departmental variation on top
Most of the design work was in the interaction layer rather than the visual one. A platform that twenty-nine departments could adopt without it ever feeling like twenty-nine different products. Below: a sample of the artefacts.
What the work taught me
myHub fundamentally changed how I think about systems design.
Not because of the scale, but because of the operational complexity underneath it. Shared systems. Governance. Platform logic. Cross-team alignment. Controlled flexibility. Designing patterns that had to survive years of rollout across completely different environments.
The work stopped being about screens very quickly. It became about building systems stable enough that dozens of teams and departments could continue using them without the experience fragmenting over time.
Select highlights
UK Government departments live on the platform, including the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice.
Programme-level savings the platform contributed to as part of SSCL's wider service delivery work.
Veterans and serving personnel reached via the follow-on Armed Forces Personnel Portal.
Leading the product design work at Squiz across the multi-tenant platform.
Twenty-nine deployments running on shared interaction logic, controlled theming, and composable workflow patterns.
Patterns established through myHub informed the Armed Forces Personnel Portal that followed it.