Intellectual Property Office
Unifying the UK's Intellectual Property Registry
Duration
Jun 2022 - Mar 2024
My Role
Senior Service Designer
The Brief
My Role
Research
Workshops
Design
Stakeholders
Dev collab
Reflection
The UK Intellectual Property Office ran three entirely separate digital services — Patents, Trademarks and Designs. Each had its own portal, its own login, its own forms. For businesses needing all three, this fragmentation created real operational burden: the same information entered multiple times, no shared view of IP assets, no status visibility across services.
Discovery had already established that a unified account was viable. I joined at the start of Alpha — the GDS phase where you take those recommendations and start building and testing real solutions against real users. My focus was the Trademarks workstream within a three-parallel-workstream programme.
I was the Senior Designer on a lean three-person team — myself, a manager-level designer/PM (Millie), and a senior developer who became ill partway through and was not replaced for two months.
I was responsible for GDS-compliant prototyping, user research, Assisted Digital design, workshop facilitation, and — when the developer was absent — basic coded prototypes using the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.
I also mentored junior designers, ran an Adobe XD training workshop, and covered sprint coordination during Millie's leave.
Millie and I ran paired usability testing sessions across four user groups: individual applicants, SME owners, IP attorneys, and IPO examiners. Including examiners — the backstage users — let us map where the biggest delays were actually happening, not just where users experienced friction on the front end.
Three pain points emerged consistently: fragmented identity across three logins, zero visibility after application submission, and Nice Classification errors causing costly rejections. These became the hypotheses the Alpha prototypes were built to test.
We also visited the British Library in person — where physical trademark records pre-2006 are held in archive — to ground the Assisted Digital pathway in real user behaviour rather than assumptions. That visit directly shaped the offline support design.
I facilitated co-design sessions using Microsoft Teams Whiteboard with mixed rooms of Deloitte professionals and IPO managers. These sessions surfaced real disagreements between teams with different priorities — and facilitation was the mechanism for making those productive before they became expensive downstream.
At one point, all three parallel workstreams stalled because each team had different assumptions about shared components — the unified account model and shared form logic. I mapped the dependencies explicitly across workstreams and facilitated a cross-team conversation that unblocked everyone.
I produced mid-fidelity wireframes first — testing information architecture and trust before investing in visual polish — then moved to high-fidelity GDS-compliant prototypes once the IA was validated. All screens were built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start, not checked at the end.
I also ran a hands-on Adobe XD workshop for junior designers and developers — tailored to two audiences — so prototype work was not bottlenecked on one person.
When the developer became ill, I installed the GOV.UK Prototype Kit myself, built basic coded prototypes using my HTML and CSS knowledge, and passed them to a senior developer on another workstream to refine. It kept momentum going during a critical two-month gap.
Mentoring
Millie and I ran usability testing on a fortnightly cadence aligned to the sprint cycle, bringing evidence into every sprint review so stakeholders saw real user behaviour continuously rather than trusting a summary at the end.
When I identified that a recurring team meeting had no agenda, no instructions and no purpose — only anxiety — I went directly to an IPO project manager and framed it as a process improvement. The meetings were removed. That taught me something I have carried forward: Directness in government consultancy can work, but needs to be balanced with keeping your own internal chain informed first.
Design work was tracked in Azure DevOps (ADO). I managed my own design tasks within the sprint backlog, flagged dependencies between design outputs and development work early, and covered sprint coordination during Millie's leave. Prototypes were handed over via annotated Adobe XD files.
During the developer's absence I used the GOV.UK Prototype Kit and GitHub to produce and share coded prototypes directly.
I ran a hands-on Adobe XD workshop tailored to both designers and developers. Designers needed component and interaction features; developers needed enough familiarity to engage with what they were being handed to build. After the session, the team could use prototypes independently — which reduced single-point-of-failure risk in an already lean team.
Impact
The Alpha phase delivered GDS-compliant prototypes validated with real users, a fully designed Assisted Digital support pathway grounded in primary archive research, a refined Trademarks service blueprint with cross-workstream dependencies mapped, and an evidence base that carried the programme into Beta.
The broader IPO transformation programme produced 59 as-is and to-be journey maps and 22 service blueprints across four Discovery and Alpha phases. The service launched in 2023 with 96 features, transforming both the internal and external experience of the UK's IP registration system. Source: Deloitte UK case study, IPO Government & Public Sector — ITRG.
59
Journey Maps Produced
22
Service Blueprints
Phase
Alpha and Beta (GDS)
96
Features at launch
Making the UK's IP system more accessible is not a nice-to-have — it has direct implications for how the UK supports innovation at a national level. Accessibility in a national government service is a policy obligation. That context shaped every design decision.
What I would do earlier
Push for explicit alignment on shared components across all three workstreams before Alpha prototyping began. Those dependencies surfaced later than they should have. In a lean programme with compressed timelines, upstream clarity is worth slowing down to get right.
What the developer absence taught me
Resourcing risk needs to be escalated faster. We absorbed two months of uncertainty before scope was formally reduced. I would name that risk earlier and push for a clear decision rather than waiting for it to resolve itself.
What I am proud of
The British Library visit. It would have been easy to design the Assisted Digital pathway from behind a screen. Going to where offline users already were — seeing the physical records, understanding the friction firsthand — produced design grounded in real behaviour.
Gov criteria — self-assessment
Agile multidisciplinary team — embedded in Alpha sprint cycle with designers, developers, policy leads, legal advisors and delivery managers across a 9-month engagement
Accessible design — WCAG 2.1 AA built in from the start. Assisted Digital pathway with primary archive research. Multi-channel coverage: digital, phone, in-person archive
UCD deliverables — mid and hi-fi prototypes, usability testing sessions, Assisted Digital documentation, service blueprint contribution, cross-workstream dependency maps
Prototyping tools — Adobe XD (mid and hi-fi). GOV.UK Prototype Kit (basic HTML/CSS coded prototypes during developer absence). GitHub for file management
Usability testing — fortnightly sessions across four user groups throughout Alpha. Paired interview method. Findings fed directly into sprint priorities
GOV.UK Design System — all hi-fi prototypes built to GDS component library and interaction patterns. GDS assessment evidence pack informed
Community of practice — Adobe XD workshop for junior designers and developers. Cross-workstream alignment sessions. Service design best practices embedded across IPO staff
Mentoring and coaching — Adobe XD workshop tailored to two audiences. Sprint coordination covered during Millie's leave. Junior designer support throughout
Developer collaboration — ADO sprint management, dependency flagging, annotated Adobe XD handover, GOV.UK Prototype Kit coded prototypes, GitHub access