Rural grants and payments to support the farming industry

Overview

The Rural Payments service is an online registration platform used by farmers, animal keepers, rural traders, and businesses. Through this service, they can register their details, view and update digital maps of their land, and submit online applications for rural grants and payments.

User research

User research played a crucial role in the project, providing valuable insights that shaped both the design and our overall approach. We observed farmers using prototypes in their offices and on their farms, allowing us to learn directly from how they interacted with the service.

Researchers provided key insights into our users’ needs, ensuring that our design patterns and page flows worked effectively. The research also included people with disabilities and those less familiar with technology.

It was particularly insightful to observe non-tech-savvy individuals interacting with the prototypes and to understand how rural locations negatively impacted internet connectivity.

A solid foundation

The Government Digital Service (GDS) created a design system to ensure consistency across all government services. This provided a solid foundation, including patterns for typography, colours, grids, and form-based elements.

However, the GDS system lacked certain patterns essential to our specific service and user needs. To address this, we designed and developed our own custom patterns, extending the existing framework to better serve our users.

Our own design system

We designed new components such as pagination, tabs, collapsibles, and alerts, with usability as the priority in every design decision. Each element was fully accessible and compliant with relevant standards.

Additionally, we collaborated closely with the Government Digital Service (GDS) to design and develop new patterns. This was an invaluable process to ensure that everything created met the high standards required for GDS service standards.

Complimented by others

Other Government departments referenced our design system for patterns that had not yet been addressed by the Government Digital Service (GDS). This helped guide their own design work and filled gaps where GDS patterns were unavailable.

The results

We designed and prototyped pages quickly and efficiently, gathering feedback promptly. This enabled us to identify usability issues early, implement changes, and retest.

By collaborating closely with a content designer and user researcher, we were able to swiftly update and enhance prototypes, test, and gather insights before developers began coding the necessary functionality for the live service.

The design system ensured design consistency, clean semantic accessible code, provided guidance for both designers and developers, and allowed us to rapidly prototype user flows.