Earlier this year, I had the chance to speak at Google Next '24 in Vegas. The topic? "Breaking Silos Worldwide."

While prepping, I started thinking about how we've been tackling this within  UNOPS (United Nations Office for Project Services ) – especially from a UX perspective. It's a common challenge: many organisations end up with a bunch of custom-built systems 

 various vendor solutions (SaaS or PaaS). This ends up creating a disjointed experience for users – they're constantly jolted as they switch between different applications.

We could just tell users to deal with it, right? After all, it's not like we have total control over everything. And honestly, that's probably the most common approach. But I think there's a better way.

A while back, I decided to fully embrace our main vendor ecosystem – for us, that's Google Workspace. It's the productivity suite for everyone at UNOPS, although we do use other vendor ecosystems like Atlassian and Salesforce.

For me, this "leaning in" meant finding ways to blur the lines between our in-house apps and Google Workspace. This started with adopting Google's toolbar design in our intranet:

We continued with other designs that aimed to match the Google Workspace feel:

I know, I know – it's easy to say these designs are just copying Google. But remember 

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

If your users are already familiar with something, why make them struggle with something different? It might not be the most groundbreaking approach, but it 

. There are times when I deviate a bit from this, often by using Material Design. This is mainly because I'm aiming for some consistency, and let's be real – I don't have Google's research budget!

kay, now back to that "multiple ecosystems" thing...

Obviously, I'm not suggesting we force Material Design into Atlassian or Salesforce. When we're working directly within those ecosystems, we of course stick to their design language.

 working within a specific ecosystem, I think about "proximity." Certain groups of people use certain sets of applications, and some tasks naturally flow together. When those are more aligned with one ecosystem, it makes sense to adopt that design language for related products and tools.

In short, to create a more cohesive user experience within a multi-vendor environment, we've chosen to prioritise familiarity and consistency by aligning our in-house designs with our main vendor ecosystem, Google Workspace. This doesn't mean we blindly copy everything, but rather we strategically adopt elements to reduce user friction and create a sense of continuity across platforms.

Blurring Boundaries

Have you ever thought about how the way we design products is a bit like sculpting? It might seem strange, but hear me out.

Every time we add something to a product, we make it more complex. More complexity equals more mental effort for our users, also known as cognitive load. This cognitive load can be split into two types: intrinsic (the unavoidable difficulty of the task itself) and extraneous (the extra effort caused by how the information is presented).

When we make a product overly complex, we're likely adding to the extraneous cognitive load. This makes it harder for users to do what they want and makes the whole experience less enjoyable. The end result? Lower user satisfaction and less chance of our product being a success.

So, where does sculpture fit into all this?

Michelangelo famously said, "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Think of your product as that marble block, and your delete key as a chisel. You can chip away at your product to reveal its purest, most essential form – the core function without all the unnecessary extras.

Like Marie Kondo tidying up a house, ask yourself, "Does this feature truly serve the essential function, or is it just here because someone asked for it, or I thought it was cool?" The art lies in knowing what to remove.

Software, thankfully, is more forgiving than marble. We have version control and saved designs, so mistakes can be undone. If you get a little overzealous with your chisel, don't worry – it's not the end of the world.

I know what some of you are thinking. "But my product is super complex! And my stakeholders are impossible!"

For truly complex products, we need to accept that some level of intrinsic cognitive load is unavoidable. 

reminds us that every system has a certain amount of irreducible complexity. But that doesn't mean we can't make it better! We can use techniques like 

, adaptive, and predictive complexity (but that's a topic for another day).

As for those unreasonable stakeholders... well, let's just say my answer is probably best left unsaid.

The next time you look at your delete key, see it as a creative tool, not just a destroyer of digital worlds. You might be surprised at what you can sculpt.

Complexity & Sculpture

Conception, design and implementation of a toolbelt of interstitial tools, that exist between UNOPS (a UN agency) products, to support colleagues’ daily work.

The product is a direct response to the agency’s difficulty in realising its investment in knowledge due to disparate sources and an incredibly diverse user base. Tools included for the initial release- a product launchpad, an organisational knowledge finder (based on Google Vertex AI) with a virtual colleague (based on Google Vertex AI) and a centralised notifications/actions channel following in a subsequent release.

Enhance our colleagues ability to work by providing tools that are aware of our organisational context, within our application landscape but not part of applications.

by leveraging tools for improved utilisation of both in-house and SaaS applications, while also addressing tasks beyond the scope

Whilst remaining apart from applications tools can make use of integrations to interact with them and allow users to perform quick actions out with an application context.

Initially Toolbelt plans to address four key needs.

UNOPS has an extensive application landscape which is constantly evolving. Coupled with this UNOPS has an incredibly diverse workforce which is constantly evolving. New, and existing, colleagues find it a challenge to locate known applications and discover new ones.

Launchpad is a Toolbelt tool that supports application discovery and allows users to use predefined application lists or create their own custom lists. It supports a set of core applications that are important to the organisation but also allows users to add their own applications and other URLs.

UNOPS has a large unrealised investment in structured and unstructured data. This exists in a large number of disparate repositories across BigQuery, Drive, Atlassian Confluence & Jira amongst others. It is challenging for colleagues to know of the existence of these repositories, which repositories may contain the desired information and how to search for it.

Find is a Toolbelt tool that supports a single interface for colleagues to search for the desired information across the range of available repositories.

Having a "virtual colleague" to assist on the tedious tasks would free up time for more creative collaboration with human colleagues, strengthening relationships, and emphasising strategic thinking. This would enhance innovation and quality in the professional environment.

Omni is a Toolbelt tool that supports colleagues in a conversational manner with knowledge discovery, creative input and other convenient task completions.

Many applications within the UNOPS landscape require colleagues to perform actions when prompted. Common mechanisms of prompting are email and in-app notifications. Colleagues are experiencing increasingly overloaded inboxes and prompts can be missed. In-app notifications are by nature only discovered when a colleague is in the app.

Updates is a Toolbelt tool that provides a common point to surface prompts from many applications and a means to easily complete simple actions without navigating to the app. This can allow users to complete many actions without the additional cognitive load of application context switching.

Toolbelt & Virtual Colleague

An internal kit of tools that can be combined in order to support product management and product managers within a UN agency.

The toolkit consists of a mix of documents that tackle topics such as Design Sprints, Product Roadmaps, Design Critiques, Measuring User Satisfaction and High Performance Team techniques amongst others. The documents were written to concisely offer advice and guidance to product managers at a time were the product management practice was emerging. The documents continue to serve the purpose as aide-mémoires and practical guides for continued practice.

The advice given within the documents dovetails with other tools from the kit and with internal systems used by the organisation to manage its day-to-day digital activities. 

One of the larger tools is an end-to-end framework to support UNOPS’s emerging product management practice and product managers. This framework collates internal tools and articles that I’ve created alongside external tools and articles that I’ve found useful when coordinating product management activities within UNOPS.

The framework guides product manages through the five key stages of the product lifecycle. 

The framework is intended to be a light touch approach where buy is in voluntary and based on the value the framework brings rather than as a top down compliance mechanism.

Although the framework is presented as a checklist, it is not prescriptive and some of the steps are not mandatory, with the mandatory steps being easily distinguishable.

The checklist is broken up in to sections the five key stages and the product manager is invited to duplicate the Delivery and Iteration tabs as you need them to support iterations (V1,V2,V3...) of their Product. There is also provision within the tabs to allow for the repetition of sections such as Build(s) in Product Delivery. These are suffixed with (s) to act as a visual hint for the product manager.



Product Management Toolkit

A series of three tools that support physical infrastructure activities in their attempt to deliver on Sustainable Development Goals reimplemented and combined into a suite with shared membership.

As part of the project a portable UX lab was constructed on an aggressively small budget. The lab was used to test the usability of the tools and has provision for participant eye tracking using consumer-level gaming technology.

Designed in collaboration with UNOPS’s Strategic Initiatives team SustainABLE this was a challenging project to redesign and re-implement two existing web products and a highly complex Google Sheet as three web products that would comprise a suite. A key challenge was taking the stakeholders’ significant expertise in civil engineering and sustainability and a making this accessible to a wide audience with a broad range of skills and experience.

The project delivered on a suite of three complimentary products that assist the end user in self-service assessing, supporting and funding infrastructure projects that have ambitions to contribute towards the United Nations’ 

UNOPS user experience design philosophy is shaped by a heavy adoption of three key vendor ecosystems - Atlassian, Google and Salesforce. The conscious approach is one of reducing the perception of barriers between in-house products and vendor products. The consideration of which vendor design language (Atlassian, Lightning, Material) to adopt is based on the conceptual proximity of the in-house product to the vendor products. As Google’s Material has larger adoption, this is the default choice and was used as the basis for design decisions on this project.

In this project I undertook the initial design work prior to onboarding a designer dedicated to the project. As part of the initial design key decisions were made - such as the adoption of the Material design language and the core goal of simplifying the experience for the end users. Following this I took on a design direction & mentorship role for the remainder of the project.

ActionABLE offers a reasonably basic take on an expert system that tailors a set of actions that can contribute towards achieving SDGs by asking the user to complete a questionnaire. It provides the user with a means to create and manage their assessment and supports exported action plans that provide concrete actions that can be taken to achieve SDGs and their targets.

The project leaned heavily into accessibility and usability, as part of the project the existing usability testing approach was augmented by the use of consumer grade / gaming eye tracking hardware and open source software. The feedback gained from this approach was incorporated into further iterations of the products and resulted in significant improvements. Accessibility was a key consideration for the project and at the time of deliver all key metrics were met.

Sustainable Development Goals

UNOPS have a need to communicate openly about their projects and activities with multiple external stakeholder groups. It is important that this communication is as open and free as possible without compromising the operational security of colleagues, and suppliers, working in some of the most challenging contexts in the world.

Working closely with multidisciplinary team of stakeholders the project aims to replace the hugely dated incumbent product with one that is visually fresher and with additional capabilities. Three key challenges are divergent needs from disparate personas, delivering a storytelling experience from essentially dry data & delivering a simple solution that is accessible for all.

UNOPS user experience design philosophy is shaped by a heavy adoption of three key vendor ecosystems - Atlassian, Google and Salesforce. The conscious approach is one of reducing the perception of barriers between in-house products and vendor products. As Google’s Material has larger adoption, this is the default choice however with a key component of the project brief being to deliver a “visually stunning” product there was an early decision to move away from the organisational default and to build a visual identity that pushed the boundaries of the organisational brand book without crossing them.

In this project I’ve taken a hands off approach to the design acting purely in a design direction & consultancy role. In parallel to this I’ve advised on the feasibility of technical implementation and rapidly prototyped some of the designers’ concepts to pathfind for the development resource. This has been particularly useful for aspects of motion design where there was communication challenges due to the limitations of Figma prototyping.

There's quite a lot of text on the screen and other visual elements competing for attention. The map displayed is quite small and repeats along the x axis.

In the reimplementation the globe is fully manipulable and invites a playful interaction with the user. During user testing eye tracking, observation and user interviews highlighted the globe as a highly appealing feature.

The map and the table compete for the user's attention. The table does not provide affordances, or other visual clues, to invite the user to manipulate the columns.

The redesign moved to a two column approach with the sidebar providing highlight, summary and supportive content. The inclusion of simplified 

 (Sustainable Development Goals) markers and flags allows for a little more information density without overwhelming the user. Further information is available by tooltip, the flags hidden by overflow are also shown on hover.

The map dominates the sparse details page, whilst the contracts and documents tabs toward the bottom contain tables of information the initial project details tab is very sparse. Overall the page lacks balance and is uninspiring. 

The globe "flies" from the user's location to the selected project's location to help the user contextualise the location. The map theme choice was a deliberate decision to minimise the use of extraneous colour and reduce the number of elements vying for attention.

The table provides a means for the user to selective show and hide columns, the columns themselves are resizable and sortable. The table may be expanded fully - animating the side panel off of the left of the screen. 

Pie chart is one of a range of chart types available in the product. The colour palettes used are thematic, aligning with different information types.

UN Open Data Portal

Working closely with the UNOPS communication team and a third party design house Hinderling Volkart (now a part of 

) to update the agency’s public persona by delivering a fresh, new web visibility product that could more accurately reflect the dynamic nature of the organisation.

The project involved a departure from the technology status quo with a shift from Microsoft Sharepoint to a headless CMS - 

. The shift delivered on considerable cost savings and a superior experience for site visitors and authors.

The product also makes use of industry leading products from our technology partners with both Google Maps and Google Cloudsearch being key enablers for the site’s functionality.

There is also integration with other organisational products, with up-to-date project information being fed from the UNOPS 

 to the product and narrative stories travelling from the product to the 

The project also involved a design philosophy departure with Brad Frost’s 

 being at the very core of the project. The success of this decision has led to a fundamental change in the way that visibility products are built at UNOPS and it has been a key contributor towards the site’s longevity and ability to remain fresh without the need for further implementations.

Even with consideration towards the very serious mission of the organisation there are still somewhat playful delightful details sprinkled throughout the product that capitalise on low impact techniques such as traditional SVG and 

The product was extremely well received garnering considerable positive feedback and winning a 

. But the true testament is that it has stood the test of time, with the external communications team still able to use the product to deliver upon their storytelling mission for the UN agency.

The approach taken for hosting the site was also a radical departure from previous work, with a containerised approach running on 

as well as utilising caching and a CDN. This approach gives an elastic and resilient product which scales to meet demand, self heals in the event of issues and allows for zero downtime product releases.

UN Agency Website

UNOPS, a UN agency, has approximately 7,000 colleagues who work on around 1,000 projects a year in around 100 countries around the world. Many of these locations are in some of the world's most challenging contexts. As the organisation is a project based organisation colleagues join and leave as projects start and end.

To support this UNOPS need an easy to use means of retrieving important information as and when needed. It's vital that this means is usable without onboarding both for product consumers and producers.

Interestingly one of the KPIs identified by the product owner was to increase the number of visits, whilst at the same time decreasing the amount of time taken to successfully retrieve information. This was a large departure from the previous iteration where longer visit times were seen as desirable. 

Another key requirement for the project was to decrease territorialism and competition over Intranet pages as part of an overall desire to reduce the amount of time spent on creating content.

A minimal design product that is focused on content delivery over ornamentation. The product is highly attuned to being accessible using techniques to limit line length for readability, adaptive font sizes based on the available screen space that are clamped to avoid too much variance and the usual attention to the 

The product leverages the organisation's investment in the Google Workspace ecosystem by integrating with Google Directory (people), Google Drive (documents) and Google Cloud Search (search). It's also integrated with the organisational data warehouse for further enrichment of people in the search.

 the product followed some of the same patterns.

 principles at its very core. This combinations allows for highly flexible "builders" that allow our content creators to assemble content from a selection of discrete building blocks that offer a wide degree of variation within the minimal design approach.

The project was couched in the terms of an innovation project which set out with the goal of replace a UN agency's (UNOPS) Intranet with a new product whilst reimagining the culture of production, management and consumption of content.

Closed innovation was adopted, contact with external bodies constituted fact-finding rather than collaboration. Collaboration occurred within UNOPS but this aligned with multidisciplinary participation rather than open innovation.

Various perspectives were considered when understanding the innovations type to be attempted:

Replacing/upgrading an incumbent system was viewed as 

, whereas radical changes to platform type was considered 

 and a broadened readership (new markets) 

The approach was modelled on the Gartner method shown below.

Additionally Design Sprints would be used at a tactical level within the Lean Startup iterations.

The project team had no previous professional history so the 

 approach was used to bootstrap a productive culture quickly. The result of this was an agreed team purpose that would be used as a touchstone throughout the project.

21 semi-structured user interviews were undertaken following the Harvard D.School method 

. Audio recordings of these interviews were made for subsequent analysis.

Statistical analysis of content consumption on the incumbent product, was undertaken using data from Google analytics.

Interviews and demonstrations were sought with comparable teams, peer organisations and industry leaders.

There was a further gathering and review of industry best practices in this field.

The project team undertook analysis, breaking down larger concepts, and synthesis - reassembling our conclusions.

The interview recordings were analysed garnering insights.

It was noted that some interviewers displayed bias in interviews and “defended” incumbent product shortcomings. This was highlighted, discussed and they resolved to mitigate this.

Insights were clustered into key-insights:

Key-insights which required further exploration were identified, respecting project context and organisational boundaries, arriving at a shortlist.

The need for further exploration necessitated a second Empathise iteration.

This iteration was shorter with less participants, activities included:

Statistical analysis, verification of assertions made to date.

Renewed contact with peer organisations.


Participants were interviewed on individually selected key- insights.

Trigger materials, paper based prototyping kits, were introduced for abstract topics.

As with the previous iteration analysis and synthesis was undertaken, digesting and reconstituting learnings.

A vision document (problem definition) and an abbreviated “pitch-deck” to sell the idea to key stakeholders were created.

We encountered unexpected resistance from a key stakeholder on the vision’s concepts of personalisation and democratisation of communication channels.

An unfortunate decision was taken overriding findings on these key-points.

As these were key-points of the vision we pivoted, iterated the vision and documented this as business requirements (project brief).

Within the team, there was some reflection that this decision compromised some of the key tenets of the original vision, putting the “desirability” of the product at risk.

The team organised a number of workshops to co-create prototypes with end-users.

The workshops used aspects of the Design Sprints methodology - in particular lightning demos, crazy 8’s, solution sketches, art gallery, dot voting and rapid prototyping.

Workshops held:

The Hub is the starting point of the Intranet. During the workshop paper prototypes where created. These were explored in the Art Gallery without explanation and critiqued by the participants. A high fidelity, code-based, prototype was created using the best features of the proposed prototypes.

Navigation was highlighted as one of the major weaknesses of the incumbent Intranet, accordingly extra attention was paid and in all ten workshops were held. An initial multi-business unit workshop decided upon topics, which the following nine workshops explored.

This resulted in four prototypes:

V1 - Low Fidelity. Paper. Test nested approach.

V2 - Low Fidelity. Paper. Test generic navigational paths.

V3 - Low Fidelity. Paper. Test specialist navigational paths.

V4 - High Fidelity. Digital. Digital creation & testing.

V1 - learnings, paper prototype too fragile.

V2 - adopted spray glue approach for robust paper prototypes.

V3 - co-creation and testing with business units on topics they “own”.

V4 - creation of code based prototype for digital testing.

This workshop was not entirely successful. Whilst there was a plurality of ideas, many were outlandish with questionable benefits or too difficult to implement.

On reflection it was handled badly, we asked too much of the participants who were working beyond their skill sets. Nevertheless, key features were used as content building blocks used to build the prototypes.

Prototypes V1-V4 were a collaboration in 

 between the project team and UNOPS graphic designers. Each iteration was reviewed and critiqued by both teams before feedback from peers was sought and incorporated in subsequent iterations.

UN Agency Intranet

Welcome to my own little spot on the web.

I've been wrangling tech teams for over 25 years, guiding them to deliver awesome projects and spark innovation. My leadership secret? A sprinkle of coaching, a dash of mentoring, and a whole lot of collaboration. I'm all about empowering my teams and creating a safe space where everyone feels comfortable sharing their craziest ideas (some of them even work!). I have a knack for spotting emerging trends and turning complex challenges into elegant solutions.

Forget about boring, clunky interfaces. I'm a firm believer in putting the user front and centre. Whether it's designing a website, web product or a mobile app, I always ask myself: "How can I make this experience enjoyable and intuitive for everyone?" Accessibility, equity, and inclusivity aren't just buzzwords to me; they're fundamental principles that guide every design decision I make.

I'm like a translator, bridging the gap between tech, design and the users. With a deep understanding of both web technologies and user behaviour, I craft UX strategies that are both innovative and practical. My toolkit is packed with the latest industry best practices, from design sprints to user research, all aimed at creating digital experiences that are as delightful as they are effective.

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