Engineering spa · Bologna · Regione Veneto and Regione Lombardia
Consulting is three clients at once, and none of the products are yours.
At Engineering, a twelve thousand person consultancy, I was the designer on public administration work: three services, two regional governments, running in parallel. Nobody hands a consultant a roadmap. You are brought in because design has to happen, on somebody else's product, to somebody else's deadline, alongside developers who were there before you and will be there after.
The design problem underneath all three was the same. A public portal is organised the way the institution is organised: by department, by procedure, by the law that created the procedure. A person arrives with a problem, and a problem does not know which department it belongs to.
There is no competitor here either. If the service is hard nobody churns, they just fail to get the thing they are entitled to, or they give up and go to a counter, which costs the region more than the portal saved it.
What a consultant actually does
Three clients in parallel, and the deadlines are set by procurement.
In a consultancy design is not one person on one product. It is several projects running at the same time, for public bodies, against dates that were fixed in a tender document before anybody drew anything.
When the load went past what I could draw myself, freelancers and agencies were brought in and I directed their work. That changes what a designer produces. The deliverable stops being a screen and becomes something another designer can follow with me not in the room, which is a different craft and a much better habit.
It also changes what you spend time on with the client. A large part of it was explaining research results to people who had never commissioned research before, and turning "we need a portal" into a set of decisions somebody was willing to sign.
The half nobody sees
Research in a public body is two jobs: run it, then get it believed.
Personas and usage scenarios, usability testing with reports, competitor and customer analysis, and the feedback the live services were already producing. Standard work. The unusual part was the second half, because a public client has procurement, politics and a legal department, and none of them were in the sessions.
Four audiences, one interface
A public service cannot choose its users. All of them turn up.
A commercial product picks a segment and designs for it. A regional portal is obliged to serve everybody who lives or trades in the region, and to be usable by the person with the least confidence, the worst connection and the oldest device. The hardest user sets the standard, not the average one.
What was built
Three services, two regional governments, all three published and still running.
These are not concepts. All three went live, all three are public, and every one of them can still be opened today, which is unusual enough in this portfolio to be worth saying plainly. Different citizens, different problems, the same underlying question: how does somebody find the one thing they need inside an institution organised around itself?
MyPortal
A general portal where local administrations make public information available, and where every citizen can build their own personal portal to reach only what concerns them.
- Information in the public domain, published by the local administration
- A personal portal each citizen assembles for themselves
- Built for the weakest sections of the community and for small business
MyPA
The regional service portal. Three ways in, deliberately: search, geolocation, and Marco, a friendly assistant who walks you through the services.
- Request information and services
- Monitor the progress of your administrative procedures
- Follow topics and bodies of interest, with notifications
- Reminders and deadlines, and the status of payments made
Siage
The platform for regional calls for proposals: grants and funding for companies and public and private bodies. One user, several profiles, because a person can apply as themselves and on behalf of an organisation.
- Browse published calls and their documentation
- Apply online, with forms and attachments
- Track the procedure, and answer requests for more documents
Three screens
Sketched, because the argument is what happens when you touch it.
Three decisions carried most of the weight across the three services: let the person say who they are, show a procedure as a thing in motion, and let somebody read a form before it can reject them. All three are live. Click anything.
The portal cannot know which department your problem belongs to. It can ask who you are, which is a question anybody can answer.
I am a…
Identity, not taxonomy. "I am a business owner" is a sentence anybody can finish. "Productive activities, one-stop shop, occupation of public land" is a sentence only the institution can finish, and it is how the same services were filed before.
It reorders, it does not hide. Everything is still reachable. Choosing an audience promotes what that audience needs and demotes the rest, because a portal that removes services creates a second problem for the person who is the exception.
Then it can come to you. Following a topic turns a portal you have to remember to visit into a thing that tells you when the rules change. That is the difference between a website and a service.
A procedure is not a document you submit, it is a thing that then happens to you for six weeks while you have no idea where it is.
Every procedure shows where it is. Submitted, being checked, waiting on you, decided. The state that matters most is waiting on you, because that is the only one the citizen can do anything about and the only one nobody was told about before.
Deadlines are the service, not a feature. Most of what goes wrong in public administration is a date somebody did not know about. Reminders sit next to the thing they belong to rather than in a calendar nobody opens.
What you owe, and what you have paid. Both, together. A citizen who cannot prove they already paid is a citizen who will phone, and the phone call costs more than the whole feature.
A funding application is long, and half of it needs documents you do not have to hand. Being refused at the end is the worst possible moment to find out.
One person, several profiles. The same human applies as themselves, as their company, and sometimes on behalf of a body they sit on. Making that a profile switch rather than three accounts is the difference between using the service and giving up on it.
Eligibility is answered first. The profile decides which calls are open to you before a single field is filled. Refusing somebody after forty minutes of typing is not a validation rule, it is an insult.
You can read the whole form before you start. Every field, every attachment, listed up front, so an applicant can gather what they need and then complete it in one sitting. This is the single most requested thing in the whole project, and it is not a feature. It is respect for somebody else's afternoon.
The constraint that shaped everything
Designed for the weakest user in the room, and the strongest one gets a better service too.
In Italian public administration, accessibility is not a preference a product owner can trade away. The obligation is on the institution, and the population it has to serve includes the people commercial products quietly design out.
What that changes is when the work happens. Accessibility as an audit at the end produces a list of contrast failures and missing labels. Accessibility as a brief at the front produces different information architecture, different language, and different defaults. The second one is cheaper and the first one does not really work.
The useful part for anything commercial: every one of these decisions also helps a confident user in a hurry on a bad connection. Nobody has ever complained that a form was too clear.
Where a consultant's design actually lives or dies
The developers were there before me, and stayed after.
Three services meant three development teams, none of which reported to me and none of which I had chosen. A consultant has no authority in that room, which turns out to be the useful constraint: you cannot mandate anything, so the design has to be worth building on its own terms.
What worked was making every artefact answer a question a developer was actually going to ask, and answering it before they had to ask it. A wireframe that shows only the happy path gets built as the happy path, and the state nobody drew becomes the state nobody handles.
The measure of a handover is what does not come back. Every question that reached me twice was a gap in the artefact, not a gap in the developer.
What it amounts to
Public services do not get relaunched every eighteen months.
This is the oldest work in this portfolio and the only entry where I can point at the thing itself and say it is still there. That is the outcome that matters in public administration: not a launch, but a service that two regional governments are still running years later.
MyPortal and MyPA for Regione Veneto, Siage for Regione Lombardia. All three are still live today.
Veneto and Lombardia, two of the largest regional administrations in Italy, each with its own procurement, its own rules and its own idea of what a portal is.
Citizens, businesses, the local administrations publishing into it, and the region owning it. Every screen had to answer to all four.