From bureaucracy to simplicity: Designing a transactions platform for Greenwich council
Creating a new transactions platform for the Royal Borough of Greenwich to make online services faster, easier, and more consistent for residents and staff.
🗺️ Context
Local councils across the UK face increasing financial pressure, making efficient digital services essential. Transactions such as requesting services, getting quotes, and making payments are key touchpoints for residents — yet many still rely on outdated systems and manual processes.
At the Royal Borough of Greenwich, modernising digital transactions became a strategic priority: not only to improve individual services, but to create a scalable platform that could support consistent, accessible, and efficient service delivery across the council.
⚠️ Problem
Transactions were delivered through a legacy forms CMS that was slow, difficult to use, and poorly integrated with backend systems.
Residents experienced confusing journeys and low trust in online services.
Staff faced manual processing, duplicated work, and inconsistent data.
Improving this required more than better forms — each transaction sat within a wider ecosystem of service models, technical integrations, and governance constraints.
🧗 Challenge
How might we design a simple, secure, and scalable transactions platform on LocalGov Drupal that works for residents, staff, and the organisation?
⚙️ Approach
I applied two perspectives to deliver across overlapping workstreams:
- 🔍 Zooming in with design thinking — designing clear, accessible online forms grounded in user needs.
- 🌐 Zooming out with systems thinking — shaping the wider platform through strategic improvements and the design system.
🧩 Zooming in: Designing the 'Get a quote for business waste collection' form
One of the first opportunities we addressed was transforming the Get a quote for business waste collection service, replacing manual requests and offline calculations with an instant digital quote journey built on the new transactions platform.
Highlights
Understanding the problem space
Exploratory workshops and desk research were used to map the current service, identify pain points, and design a proposed digital user flow.
🌐 Zooming out: Improving the platform through systems thinking
Alongside designing individual services, I established a way of working to continuously improve the transactions platform by:
- Running weekly design crits to surface recurring usability, accessibility, and scalability opportunities across services.
- Leading prioritisation workshops to focus the team on high-value improvements and embed scalable change through the design system.
Design system improvements
More compact layouts for faster scanning
Tighter spacing, reduced heading sizes and a new service navigation component to replace breadcrumbs helped to deliver a more compact UI design.
✅ Outcome
- Delivered a streamlined garden waste quote journey, improving usability and reducing manual processing
- Established a scalable transactions platform supporting multiple high-impact services
- Embedded accessibility, consistency, and reusability through the design system
- Created a continuous improvement loop driven by real service insights and strategic prioritisation