Leading UK Research University
Transforms Employee Experience
with a Unified Staff Portal
Key highlights
Employee-centered by design
Every decision was grounded in staff needs and lived pain points, not just technology.
A foundation, not a fix
Built for long-term reuse and growth, rather than a one-off patch on an old problem.
Simplicity as a strategy
Reducing burden through simpler, self-serve journeys ran through every part of the solution.
Summary
One of the UK's top research universities needed help consolidating its scattered staff applications into a single unified portal. By combining low-code and APIs with experience design, strategy, and insight, the team replaced a fragmented, poorly designed set of tools with a single, self-serve employee experience, saving the client thousands of employee hours and eliminating multiple points of frustration for staff across the university.
Client overview
Simplifying everyday work for the university staff
The client is a leading public research university in the UK, active across a wide range of academic disciplines.
Like many large institutions, the client's day-to-day staff operations, including booking holidays, reviewing contracts, and reserving an office seat, were spread across a patchwork of separate applications and systems, each with its own interface and support requirements.
Challenges
Fragmented applications, complex user journeys, and growing support demands
The staff had to navigate several applications and sources to complete routine administrative tasks, such as booking vacation time, reviewing contracts, and reserving a seat in the office.
An earlier attempt to consolidate this functionality in one place suffered from poor UX, with a confusing interface and many guides and tutorials required just to use it.
This confusing experience burdened staff and required a large support team, whose time was consumed by routine queries that should have been self-explanatory.
With support resources tied up in basic queries, more value-creating activities for the university often took a back seat.
Solution
Bringing disconnected staff services together through one intuitive, self-service portal
The client needed a unified experience across applications in a single portal, combining low-code and APIs with experience design, strategy, and insight. The team began with a discovery phase to understand the current state of the experience and the underlying technology, then built a proof of concept addressing the needs, pain points, and opportunities uncovered, grounded in experience design principles of simplicity, self-serve empowerment, personalization, productivity, and connection-building.
From there, the team designed key journeys for core HR activities such as booking leave, changing personal details, and expense claims, and built the foundations of a reusable design system.
Unified staff portal
A single portal combining low-code and APIs with experience design to bring together previously scattered applications.
Proof of concept
A design and technical proof of concept addressing the needs, pain points, and opportunities gathered during discovery.
Core HR journeys
Designed key journeys for core activities such as booking leave, changing personal details, and expense claims.
Reusable design system
Defined 15 flexible, efficient components, used to build 100+ pages across three breakpoints.
Solution enablers
Discovery-led design
A discovery phase captured the current state of the experience and the underlying technology, feeding staff research insights into every later decision.
Experience design principles
Design principles centered on empowerment through simplicity, ease of self-serve, personalization, productivity, and connection-building.
Design-engineering reuse
Close collaboration with the client's engineering team enabled high reuse, speeding up design and development as more components were created.
Living changelog and documentation
A dedicated changelog page recorded every change to the design library, and each component carried a short description to keep usage consistent.
Business outcomes
Saving thousands of employee hours while reducing friction and improving operational efficiency
Thousands of hours saved: The unified portal saved the client many employee hours previously lost to navigating fragmented tools.
Reduced friction: Removed several points of frustration from staff's everyday admin tasks.
Higher efficiency: Simpler, self-explanatory journeys reduced the burden of everyday queries on the client's support team, freeing time for higher-value work.
Unified experience: Every client employee now experiences the same simple, self-serve journey across the portal.
