A monitoring and collaboration platform for government trade committees. Designed to survive the people who leave, and orient the people who arrive.
Across four countries, national trade committees were running on WhatsApp groups, Excel files, and paper letters that took two weeks to get approved. Staff turned over every two to four years with no handover and no record. When someone left, the institutional memory went with them.
"One member leaving is a library being burnt." — Interviewee, on knowledge loss in government trade bodies
There was no formal onboarding process in any of the four countries studied. Knowledge lived in individuals, not systems. The tool had to remember what the people couldn't.
Every committee had hit the same wall. Teams were physically visiting agencies to verify a spreadsheet field had been filled in, then copying it into a Word doc to email out again. The bottleneck wasn't effort — it was structure.
Communication ranged from WhatsApp to paper letters requiring senior sign-off. No standard channel. No single place to check. Information didn't flow between stages — it restarted.
The prototype covers five interconnected flows. Three decisions are worth unpacking — each solved a different kind of problem.
The dashboard answers one question first: what do I need to do today? Personal tasks sit at the top; committee-wide progress below. Different roles — Secretariat, Senior Committee, private sector — see different views of the same data.
Reform → Working Group → Action. The Action Detail view is the atomic unit of accountability — one lead, one deadline, one place to update. The Secretariat stops being the bottleneck for every status check.
This wasn't in the brief — it came from research. Across every country, people didn't know who else was in the committee, which working group they sat in, or how to reach them without going through the Secretariat. A contacts list sounds boring. In practice it was a trust mechanism — invisible institutional structure made visible on day one.
The member directory wasn't in scope. Nobody asked for it. It emerged from research — and ended up being the thing that surprised stakeholders most in the prototype session. A contacts list functioning as a transparency mechanism only becomes visible when you spend time in the problem, not the solution.
The original ask was a reporting tool. But reporting is an output of a functioning system — and the system wasn't functioning. The shift from "how do we capture progress" to "how do we keep the thread alive" changed every design decision that followed. That reframe didn't come from a workshop. It came from sitting with the research long enough.
Every screen had to work for two people: the person using it today, and the person inheriting it in two years with no context. That's a different brief than standard UX. It made labelling, documentation, and information hierarchy feel like they carried real stakes — because they did.
"You spot flaws in the product or in the team and fix them through workshops, where we analyse the problems together. Safe to say you have the ability to inspire people and help them explore their next steps."
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