Sirio is the design system of INPS, Italy's National Institute for Social Security. This is the story of how it was created from scratch within a large and complex public administration. I won't dwell on the technical aspects: the perspective here is organizational and managerial — because that is where a project like this is won or lost, and because collaboration, more than anything else, is what made innovation possible.
The context: the scale of the problem
INPS is Europe's largest welfare institution. Its roughly 450 digital services, supported by more than 2,500 applications, are used by citizens, businesses and intermediaries, through a portal receiving about 2 million visits a day. These figures say one thing: any inconsistency in the experience gets multiplied by millions of people.
One factor was decisive from the start: top-management sponsorship. The priority of user experience was written, in black and white, into the Institute's strategic documents:
"In this digital transformation process, it's crucial that services hold clear value for the user, by delivering an experience (and not just a service) that is simple, effective, and thus recommendable."
INPS, ICT Strategic Plan 2022–2023
The problem: three critical issues, one structural obstacle
- Diverse digital services. Over 400 services, each with its own UX/UI patterns and user journeys — a fragmented experience, exposed daily to millions of people.
- No UX governance. A complete absence of centralized visual and usability standards, preventing the identification of common issues, the propagation of best practices, and the dissemination of improvements.
- No UX strategy. No shared concept of user value to guide the optimization of the experience.
Beneath these issues sat the structural obstacle: the siloed organization. Each business unit was responsible for its digital products end to end, with its own processes, tools and practices. Each unit also worked with specific external vendors, who pushed their preferred technologies, kept control over UX/UI practices, and focused on evolving their own legacy systems. The result: no consistency, and no common ground to build it on.
The strategy: start from user value
The answer was a comprehensive UX strategy, built around one question: what does it mean to improve the user experience — and how do you measure it? The strategy worked on three levels:
- User value — define a shared concept of value, and use it to prioritize activities;
- Enablers — a centralized governance to enforce standards and best practices, and a process defining the phases, blueprints and tools of service design;
- Tools — user research to gather insights and validate design; the foundations (brand manual, design system, writing guidelines) to ensure quality and consistency; and value measurement to close the loop: did we actually deliver value for the user?
Starting from zero and under tight time constraints, we chose to begin with just two elements: a clear vision and the design system. Foundations first, everything else after.
Three resistances, three strategies
1. The siloed culture
Every service had been developed in isolation: no inter-silo communication, no common processes, no shared standards. The answer was a community of practice — a virtual team called UX@INPS, under the initiative "Progettare per il Cittadino" (Designing for the Citizen) — bringing together people from the most relevant silos, chosen for the impact of their services on the experience. Two forms of backing proved indispensable: top-management sponsorship, which legitimized the initiative, and the endorsement of frontline staff, which brought the practical experience of those who work on the services every day into the project.
2. The failed attempts of the past
We were not the first to try: over the years, UI kits, web kits and design libraries had been built and had never spread beyond one or two teams. The prevailing sentiment was pure skepticism: "You aren't going to make it; we already tried." The antidote was to reverse the approach: not a top-down directive, but a "let's build this together" — involving everyone from day one, distributing ownership, keeping eyes on the long-term vision. And crucially: don't throw away the previous attempts — collect and analyze them, so that past work becomes a foundation rather than rubble.
3. The vendor ecosystem
Hundreds of technology vendors, each with its own platforms, often competing with one another. The lever was to engage the vendors' frontline people — designers and front-end developers — because they share the same goal as the users: they want the product to work. Brought around the same table, even when they belonged to competing companies, they found a natural synergy. Collaboration won where competition would have blocked everything.
The process: widen to decide, narrow to produce
The design system was built through thematic sprints (typography, colors, components...), each alternating between wide and narrow moments:
- Research — a small team of designers (3–6 people) runs stakeholder interviews, field studies, benchmarks;
- Workshop — a core team of 10–15 people from different silos makes the shared decisions;
- Design — the small team produces the assets;
- Review — the extended team (30+ stakeholders) validates, comments, aligns;
- Refine & delivery — the small team refines; the extended team holds the final showcase and signs off.
Vision before pixels
The founding stone of the project was a vision defined collectively, with people from every silo:
Vision: "Craft digital solutions that elevate citizens' quality of life."
Mission: "Provide citizens with all — and only — the essential information and services they actually need for their social protection, eliminating unnecessary complexity, through a digital platform that is simple, accessible, and continuously optimized."
These are not ceremonial words: they are the criteria by which design decisions are made to this day.
What Sirio actually is
The design system has two parts. The guidelines: a style guide for visual standards, a UI guide for interface best practices, a content guide for writing simple, accessible content. And the resources: a library of reusable components and toolkits for developers. Everything is public at inps.design, the central hub of INPS design.
What helped, what didn't
In hindsight, three conditions favored the project: the need for a standard was obvious to everyone (nobody was defending 500 services that all looked different); there were no ownership conflicts, because the initiative was new and unclaimed; and there was a unifying goal — improving the experience of every service. Working against us were the usual suspects: the perceived loss of control of those who saw the standard as a limit to their autonomy; the initial lack of understanding of what a design system even is; and the physiological resistance to change.
And it must be said honestly: collaboration has a cost. Reviews with large groups consume time; collective decisions reduce individual control and make changing course harder. When alignment on goals is low and competition for ownership is high, that cost can outweigh the benefits — a theme I explored in a dedicated model: collaboration is not a silver bullet. Sirio had the luck — and the deliberate construction — of sitting in the right quadrant: high alignment, low competition.
The impact
Sirio has standardized the experience of the inps.it portal, the native apps and dozens of digital services, with a potential reach of 45 million people. It also produced an effect that was not in the plan: the rebranding of INPS, which arrived with the Institute's 125th anniversary, was driven by the design system — a reversal of the usual sequence, in which brand identity precedes system design. Starting from the design system generated a digital-first identity: modern, accessible, user-centred.
The work was recognized with a Silver at the GOV Design Awards 2022, inclusion in the ADI Design Index 2022 and an iF Design Award 2023 — and later with an Honourable Mention at the XXVIII ADI Compasso d'Oro.
Three lessons
- Resistance is overcome through collaboration. Silos, past failures, competing vendors: the key was harmonizing efforts and aligning very different stakeholder groups around a shared vision.
- The right collaborative tools: a community of practice with a shared vision; large teams for workshops and reviews, small teams for production; and existing foundations as the starting point — never from scratch.
- Collaboration isn't free. When alignment is low and competition high, the cost of collaborative processes can outweigh the benefits. It must be managed, not endured.