Public Sector Service Design

Public sector service design transformed how the Electoral Commission communicated complex political finance rules to the people it regulates. Through user research, information architecture and service redesign, a one-size-fits-all approach to regulatory guidance became a system designed around the people who actually need to use it - from volunteer treasurers to professional compliance officers.

The Electoral Commission regulates political party finance across the UK under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA). Its guidance covers donations, loans, campaign spending, reporting requirements and registration - complex legal territory that political parties must navigate to stay compliant.

The public sector service design challenge was that the people needing this regulatory guidance had almost nothing in common with each other:

A volunteer treasurer at a local constituency party, probably learning the role from a predecessor with no formal training

• A Head of Compliance at a national party headquarters, with professional expertise and established systems
• Someone founding a brand new party, starting from scratch with no prior knowledge of the rules

A third party - a campaigner or organisation regulated by the Commission but with no party infrastructure to lean on

These audiences had fundamentally different levels of understanding, different motivations, and completely different needs from the same body of regulatory guidance. Yet the guidance treated them all the same - dense, legislation-heavy documents that worked for experts but lost everyone else. For the volunteer treasurer who might not even realise they had compliance responsibilities, the existing approach created barriers rather than pathways to understanding. This was a public sector service design problem at its core.

The objective was a complete service redesign of how the Electoral Commission delivered regulatory guidance to political parties. Not tweaking existing documents but rethinking the entire public sector service design approach - from who needs what information, through how that information is structured and written, to the tools the Commission's own team would need to sustain the new approach.

This meant understanding the service design challenge as fundamentally about people, not documents. The Commission needed guidance that met each audience where they were - matching language, depth and complexity to actual user needs rather than the Commission's internal structure.

Understanding real users

The work began with user research across the full range of people the Commission regulates. This meant engaging with political parties of different sizes and structures to understand how party officers, treasurers and compliance teams actually interacted with regulatory guidance - where they got stuck, what language confused them, what they needed that they couldn't find.

This research revealed something that shaped the entire public sector service design approach: the gap between audiences wasn't just about knowledge level. It was about motivation, context and how people naturally look for information. A local party volunteer dips in with a specific question. A compliance officer works through guidance systematically. A new party founder needs to understand the whole landscape before they can act. Each pattern demanded a different kind of document.

Designing the information architecture

The user research led to a new information architecture - the backbone of the public sector service design - built around five distinct document types, each designed for a different depth of engagement:

Introductions - user-focused guides organised by audience type ("Being a Local Party Officer", "Starting a New Party"), offering an overview and signposting to relevant documents

• Topic overviews - accessible summaries of specific areas like donations, loans or campaign spending, written at a level appropriate to each audience
• Situations and procedures - practical guides for specific tasks and common scenarios, with enough detail to act on
• Expert papers - detailed, legislation-driven documents for users who need to understand the law itself

Forms and supporting materials - the end-point documents that users were guided toward through the structure above

This tiered approach meant every user had a clear entry point matched to their role and understanding. A volunteer treasurer would start with an introduction written for their specific situation, then follow pathways into the topics relevant to them - never hitting expert-level legislation unless they chose to go deeper.

Building navigation and wayfinding

The service redesign extended beyond document content into how people moved through the guidance system. This included a naming convention that made document types instantly recognisable, wayfinding tools showing users where they were in the overall structure, relevance markers indicating which content applied to specific audiences or jurisdictions (GB, Northern Ireland), and cross-referencing between documents so related information was always signposted.

The design drew on the user research into how people actually process information - comprehension, memory, engagement and experience - translating these into practical navigation principles. White space, clear entry and exit points, logical chunking and visual accessibility weren't afterthoughts but core elements of the information architecture.

Building the Commission's capability

A critical part of the public sector service design work was ensuring the Electoral Commission could sustain and extend the new approach independently. This included a decision tree that helped Commission staff determine which document type to create for any new guidance need, audience understanding guides that embedded the user research principles into ongoing practice, and navigational principles that gave future document creators a framework to work within.

These tools meant the service design didn't depend on external expertise to maintain. The Commission gained the capability to apply the same user-centred thinking to any future guidance they produced.

The new approach was fully implemented and fundamentally changed how the Electoral Commission thought about regulatory guidance. Rather than producing documents organised around legislation, the Commission now started from the question: who needs this information, and what do they need it to do?

This matters because the alternative - the default for most regulators - is guidance written from the regulator's perspective rather than the user's. That approach assumes everyone has the same level of understanding and the same capacity to wade through complex legal text. It works for the most capable users and fails everyone else. As the National Audit Office has noted, effective regulation depends on regulators choosing the most appropriate tools to achieve their objectives - and guidance is one of the most widely used.

The service redesign created a system where information found the right level for each person naturally. A volunteer treasurer wasn't confronted with expert-level legislation. A compliance officer wasn't slowed down by introductory material. Each audience had pathways designed for how they actually work, not how the Commission happened to be organised. This is what effective public sector service design looks like in practice - not better documents, but better systems for connecting people with what they need.

The internal tools and frameworks meant this wasn't a one-off improvement. The Commission adopted the approach as its standard for guidance production going forward - a lasting shift in how it understood the relationship between regulatory guidance and the people it serves.

This project revealed something that applies far beyond the Electoral Commission: regulators tend to organise information around their own structures and legislation rather than around the people who need to use it. It's a natural default - the Commission's internal world is organised by topic and legal provision, so the guidance follows the same logic.

But the people being regulated don't experience the world that way. They experience it as roles, situations and questions. "I'm the treasurer, what do I need to know?" "We've received a donation, what do we do?" "We want to register a new party, where do we start?" Public sector service design that works starts from these questions rather than from the legislation.

The tiered information architecture developed for this project - from accessible introductions through to expert papers - demonstrated that you don't have to choose between rigour and accessibility. The same regulatory content can serve a volunteer with no training and a professional compliance officer, provided the service design creates clear pathways matched to each audience's reality.

This work helped shape an important principle in the intentional ecosystem design approach: that how people experience a service isn't separate from how the organisation behind it is structured. The Electoral Commission's regulatory guidance only worked differently once the thinking behind it changed - from "what do we need to tell people" to "what do different people need from us." That shift in perspective, from inside-out to outside-in, is where lasting public sector service design begins.

Research by the UK Parliament describes the complexity of political finance regulation under PPERA - multiple compliance requirements, different rules for different jurisdictions, and a regulatory framework that has grown steadily since 2000. Making that complexity navigable for people with vastly different capabilities requires user research, thoughtful information architecture and genuine service redesign. It's how regulation actually works in practice.