How do you build, from zero, an experience design function inside Europe's largest welfare institution? This is not the story of a project: it's the story of an organizational infrastructure — five phases, in a precise order, each made possible by the previous one.
The starting point: four challenges
The INPS of 2021 faced four structural problems: a brand identity that was out of focus and insufficiently managed; 400+ digital services, each with its own UX/UI, exposed to 45 million users through a portal with 2 million visits a day; no UX strategy — hence no shared concept of user value; and no governance — no centralized standards, no team able to identify common issues and propagate best practices.
The strategic objective: guarantee a simple, accessible and consistent experience across all channels, enabling a cultural transformation that puts the user at the center. Which requires one precise thing: establishing a centralized experience design function, supported by dedicated governance and Design Ops.
The journey in five phases
Phase 1 — The manifesto
The first activity was the drafting of a User Experience Manifesto, built collaboratively by a cross-functional team. Starting here was decisive for four reasons: bringing people on board from day one, making everyone co-responsible; reversing the top-down approach of previous attempts with a "let's build this together"; focusing everyone on long-term goals and user value; and valuing what had been done before, involving the people who had taken part in earlier attempts so their experience wouldn't be wasted.
The result: a vision ("design digital services that improve citizens' quality of life"), a mission, and operational values — people at the center, collaboration and diversity, reuse and sharing, consistency and standards, impact measurement, continuous improvement, the pursuit of objective evidence.
Phase 2 — Sirio, the design system
Why start with the design system? Because it is the fastest way to spread good practices and pursue uniformity, even in the absence of widespread governance. And because the context demanded it: the redesign of dozens of services (under Italy's Recovery Plan) was imminent, direct support for everyone was impossible, and the ecosystem of companies with design capabilities was vast.
Sirio is not just a set of guidelines: it's a complete ecosystem, publicly available at inps.design. How we got there — community of practice, large teams for workshops and small teams for production, starting from what already existed, bottom-up plus top-down — is a story of its own.
Phase 3 — The INPS Experience System
A design system without a design framework is like a box of Lego without instructions: if you already know what you want, you'll build something — but you can't do complex projects. And when services and touchpoints are built by dozens of different vendors, standardizing the process is indispensable.
The IES sets the fundamental phases of user-centred design — kickoff, research, definition, design and testing, quality assurance, post-release — and provides the templates that create common ground among the many teams and the vendors supporting them: stakeholder maps, research reports, user journeys, problem canvases, usability test reports, prioritization matrices.
Phase 4 — The rebranding
The rebranding came after Sirio, by choice. The priority was improving service quality; and it was Sirio itself that helped the organization become aware of a latent need for identity. Also because a rebranding is much harder than a design system — and 2023 marked the Institute's 125th anniversary: the right moment.
It is an interesting rebranding for three reasons: it is digital-native; it was proposed, delivered and governed by an experience design function; and it represents a virtuous case of actual alignment between promise and practice — the brand saying "why we exist" and the experience proving it. At the aspirational level, a purpose: "we believe growth is worth more when it is collective: that's why we at INPS give everyone the strength to grow".
Phase 5 — The Experience Authority
Once the standards exist — brand manual, Sirio, IES — they must be shared, explained, distributed. But you can count on spontaneous adoption only for a fraction of the organization. And for the rest? Once again: bottom-up plus top-down. The Experience Authority defines the guidelines, verifies their correct application case by case, and monitors corrective actions, across five domains: language simplification, brand identity, design system, design framework, experience quality measurement.
The most important number is the 90% of spontaneous activations: when governance works, it stops feeling like control and starts feeling like a service.
What I learned in these four years
- Public administration is a complex and complicated ecosystem. It demands pragmatism and the ability to choose your battles carefully.
- Being a good designer is not enough: it's only the beginning. What we design must actually become part of the organization — or it's useless.
- Working in the public sector can be deeply rewarding. Seriously.