A 20-year-old Oracle desktop system serving citizens, front-line staff, and senior executives — sixty officials with veto power at every sprint, and no Plan B if the design wasn't approved. I led product and service design end-to-end: human-centred research, co-design workshops with executives and front-line staff, journey maps and service blueprints, 200+ shipped screens, two phases of usability testing — delivered four weeks early, with the buffer spent converting the system into a modular, AI-assisted toolkit.
The Justice Services Branch of the Government of British Columbia had been running on an Oracle desktop application for over twenty years. It needed local installs. It didn't work on tablets. It didn't work from home. The service it supported — from front-line intake through case management to executive reporting — was bottlenecked by the software underneath, and split awkwardly across channels (desktop, paper, phone) it was never designed to span.
NTT Data Services was contracted to migrate the system to the web. My job: design every screen, build the design system to support it, map the end-to-end service journey, and shepherd all of it through approval by a 60-person leadership group with veto power at every sprint review.
There was no fallback. If consensus broke down, the contract ended and the Justice Group stayed on Oracle.
The first month wasn't design — it was diagnosis. I needed to name the constraints that would shape every decision after, because in a project this politically loaded, the wrong frame quietly kills the work months later.
I landed on three.
Senior users had built years of muscle memory around the Oracle workflow — and that workflow carried a real service path, from intake to disposition. The new web app had to preserve the end-to-end journey while modernizing the surface. I argued, repeatedly, against redesigning steps that already worked. Modernize the surface; preserve the path.
The government already had a design system for content websites. It was the wrong fit for a web application — denser data, more interaction, persistent state — but it was the visual language the public knew. I extended the language for an application context without forking the system. Same vocabulary, new sentences.
The system wasn't done when it was beautiful. It was done when sixty senior justice officials said yes. That meant rituals, framing, and a feedback loop more disciplined than the design itself. I built the cadence as carefully as I built the components.
The Government of BC's existing design system was built for content websites — typography, navigation, marketing components. Web applications are a different animal. They need data tables with sorting, filtering, and bulk actions. They need persistent navigation, modals, dense forms, status indicators, audit trails. None of that existed.
Working with the government's design team and Justice Group leadership, I built a parallel system that inherited the public-facing visual language and reorganized it around application patterns.
The website system reserved 200+ vertical pixels for a global footer. In an application where users live in data tables all day, that space mattered more than brand reinforcement. We won the argument by showing what one extra row of data felt like across two hundred screens. Approved by leadership in week three.
The website system had a basic display table — rows, columns, the end. The application needed a workhorse: column resize, sort, filter, pagination, row selection, bulk actions, inline editing, sticky headers, density toggles. This single component took six iterations and three dedicated workshops to lock down.
I built a design and service documentation library — components, journey maps, service blueprints, process diagrams, user stories — so developers, QA, and future designers could reference the system without me being the bottleneck. Every component, every state, every interaction — documented as I designed it, not after.
Before a single component was drawn I ran co-design workshops with both front-line staff and executives, then translated what I learned into journey maps, service blueprints, and process diagrams. Every screen we later designed traced back to a documented step in a documented service. It's also why scope creep stayed contained across ten months.
I designed and presented every two weeks during sprint review, in front of 60+ senior justice officials — and ran parallel co-design workshops with front-line staff between sprints. Each review surfaced new edge cases: a service step we hadn't mapped, a permission state we hadn't accounted for, a phrase a user wouldn't understand.
Over ten months we ran two phases of usability and concept testing, produced 200+ screens for a clickable walkthrough, journey maps and service blueprints for the full case lifecycle, and a roadmap document for what came after the migration. The contract was for twelve months. We finished in ten.
Co-designed processes and policies with executives and the people doing the work. Ran field research, journey-map workshops, and concept testing — the inputs that shaped every later decision.
Paired during component build to guide implementation. Adjusted specs where engineering reality didn't match design intent — and held the line where it did.
Kept the data model honest. Pushed for UX improvements that didn't compromise data integrity — accepted constraints when they did.
Ran design QA against the spec and helped define the post-launch performance measures — adoption, time-on-task, error rates — that told us whether the service was working, not just the software.
The application replaced a 20-year-old Oracle system and re-platformed the service end-to-end. Migration is ongoing — first-quarter adoption sat at 80%, and senior users were honest that the rest would take time as muscle memory transferred.
Their feedback was unanimous on the thing I cared about most: the design worked. The service held.
With four weeks of unspent contract time, I converted the design system into a modular, AI-assisted toolkit — components, journey maps, and service blueprints all searchable, generative, and maintainable by the team after I rolled off.
It's still in use.
I came in thinking the design was the deliverable. By month three I knew the narrative around the design — the rituals, the framing, the language I used in front of sixty stakeholders — was at least half the job. Senior designers don't just design. They translate the design for people who don't speak design.
The system shipped well because we documented everything alongside the work — components and journey maps, states and service blueprints, interactions and the policy decisions behind them. The documentation took as long as the design. It was worth it.
I'm proud of the new application. I'm prouder that we preserved the muscle memory of the people who used the old one for twenty years. The most senior designers I've worked with share this instinct — respect what came before, even as you replace it.
Senior product and service designer working at the intersection of systems, services, and senior stakeholders. Currently exploring next roles — gurcharanjeetsingh@gmail.com.