How a Design System Secured a $3.3M Modernization Budget
Project Overview
What does the Utah County Government do?
From Real Estate Tax System to Public Health Dashboard, these services are lifelines for residents.
25
Departments with digital solutions
30+
Public Web Applications
700k
Citizens and Non-Citizens Users
Core Problems Driving Our Initiative
The Business Problem
Costly post-launch UX problems eroded public trust and made our stakeholders (the other 24 departments) question their ROI. We needed to restore their confidence to secure our budget for our critical migration to modern web frameworks.
The User Problem
Our 700,000+ citizens faced frustrating patchwork of digital services plagued by accessibility issues and broken navigation, making them hesitant to provide the sensitive data required for essential services, which in turn caused delays and errors in service delivery.
Systems Thinking Strategy
Diagnosing Execution Failures
After our initial style guide failed to scale, I interviewed 10+ devs and PMs to map their workflow and to pinpoint the exact sources of friction:
My research revealed 3 interconnected problems spanning all parts of our operational system: our tools, our process, and our people.
This is how I planned to solve them:
01
📚 Problem: Abstract Tools
Our style guide was too abstract, lacking the coded components developers needed to build efficiently and consistently.
🧱 Solution:
A Functional Design System
Expand the guide into a dev-friendly system with a copy/paste component library.
02
🥶 Problem:
Rigid Workflow
A rigid waterfall process prevented early feedback, leading to costly late-stage rebuilds and making budget estimates unreliable.
🤸♀️ Solution:
A Hybrid-Agile Process
Replace our old method with an iterative workflow that integrated early feedback.
03
🐌 Problem:
Centralized Governance
As the sole design approver, I was a bottleneck that made the entire system unscalable.
👯♂️ Solution:
A Delegated UX Committee
I proposed forming a cross-functional committee to decentralize design decisions and empower the teams.
2023 Q3
Secure Buy-In Using Pilot Project
To rebuild trust and secure funding for a county-wide initiative, I had to first deliver a tangible win by proof of concept. I chose our most visible public asset—the main county website—as the pilot project to demonstrate the immediate impact of a user-centered design approach.
User Goals
A User-Centric Foundation
We laid the groundwork for intuitive navigation by rebuilding the site's information architecture around resident tasks, not internal department. This immediately made the site's structure more intuitive.
Intuitive Navigation Bar
Inspired by award-winning government sites, we replaced the overwhelming wall of links with a clean, layered menu. We validated the new structure with A/B testing to ensure it was easy for residents to use.
" For the first time, the county website actually makes sense. I found what I needed in two clicks instead of twenty minutes. It's such a relief."
—Brenda, Citizen User
A Better Search
Over 40% of our users prefer using a search bar instead of a menu. To show we could deliver modern, cost-effective solutions, we replaced our unreliable Google search with a powerful, in-house AI solution.
Rebuilt User Trust
✅ Guaranteed official results
📉 Real-time suggestions to reduce interaction cost
🧠 Understands natural language & typos
Proved Our Value
🏛️ $200k+ more cost-effective than external smart search solutions
🦾 Demonstrated in-house AI capabilities
👩🏻💻 Allowed for full control of search results
Powered by
Foundational Style Guide
Finally, to ensure this success could be replicated, I created the county's first web style guide.
Solved Critical Needs
🙂 Established a modern and trustworthy look
💬 Defined our brand voice
💻 Provided basic principles to guide developement
A Strategic Foundation
📈 Educated stakeholders on the value of a mature UX practice
👩🎨 Built the case for a dedicated design team
🌱 Paved the way a more robust design system
2023 Q4
Create a Dev-friendly Design System
With buy-in secured, we executed the next phase of the plan: expanding the style guide into a functional design system that solved the "Abstract Tools" problem using two pilot department projects as testbeds.
User Goals
Patterns & Components
Through an audit of all our disjointed web services, we identified that our most common layout patterns are "service one-stop" page, instructional page, and data-entry form. We then created modular components and templates for these patterns, ensuring consistency in user flows while allowing departments the branding flexibility they required.
Built with
Coded Solutions
I knew Figma design alone wouldn't guarantee quality, so I consulted our developers for the best approach: Should we adopt a commercial UI library or build an in-house solution?
My hypothesis was that our developers would favor flexibility and performance over a restrictive third-party library. Interviews confirmed this unanimously. They chose a straightforward copy/paste component library paired with a Tailwind theme package.
This approach gave them maximum ease of customization, enabled easy batch updates across all services, and provided built-in WCAG 2.2 compliance.
Integrated with
2024 Q1
Pilot New Workflow & UX Governance
Finally, we addressed the workflow and governance failures by introducing a new operational model.
User Goals
Hybrid Workflow
We replaced the rigid waterfall process with an agile workflow that integrated design thinking principles and asynchronous UX testing, eliminating late-stage rebuilds.
A Federated UX Committee
To eliminate quality control bottleneck and ensure the design system's continual evolution, I led a UX committee consisted of representatives from each development team. This way the design system can benefit from a deeper understanding of product needs while each design representative can ensure the smooth application of the design system within their team.
The UX committee reviewed high-impact patterns (e.g., new components, complex flows) via async governance—resolving most requests in <72 hours.
2024 Q2
Scaling & Securing the Budget
With a proven system and a collaborative process in place, we successfully onboarded all 25 county departments.
The pilot departments, now our strongest advocates, presented their success stories during county agenda meetings. Their testimonials, backed by our data on improved efficiency and user satisfaction, created unanimous support and were the deciding factor in securing the full $3.3 million from the county's IT upgrade fund.
2024 Q3
Impact
🇺🇸 National Recognition
Our redesign effort was recognized by the National Association of Counties (NACo) in 2024 for its best-in-class improvements to digital service delivery and operational efficiency.
Business Viability
$3.3 M
Target budget secured for web modernization
80%
Departments completed the adoption of the new design system
$0
Net cost, as savings from the design system fully funded its own development.
User Impact
100%
WCAG 2.2 compliance on new projects
150%
Increased public service utilization
4.2
/5
User rating
Operational Efficiency
40%
Reduced developer time spend on rework and redundant tasks
Retrospect
Looking back, our success hinged on key principles for running a pilot project. We started narrow with a high-impact website redesign to get a quick win. This victory was crucial for winning the trust we needed from stakeholders to scale the initiative into an adaptive, evolving design system.
But scaling created a new challenge. To fix the years of UX debt while we fought for the budget to hire more designers, I had to introduce a new workflow that stretched our developers so far outside of their roles. It was a necessary friction, made possible only by the personal rapport we’d built, but it was not a sustainable model.
The story found its proper ending after my contract ended. Management acted on the business case I had built and hired a dedicated UX team to carry the torch forward. It was the ultimate validation that my strategy—using a necessary, temporary disruption to pave the way for a permanent, sustainable solution—had worked.
