Helping UK businesses find and apply for government funding, without flattening every fund into one form.
A single application journey risked hiding important differences between funding routes.
Researched applicant needs and mapped how the funds worked in practice.
Identified which parts could be shared and which needed to stay different.
Helped shape a service model that reflected the real differences between funds.
The government wanted to make it easier for businesses to find and apply for net zero funding. From the outside, the problem looked like fragmentation: too many funds, too many routes, too many forms, and too much unclear language.
But once we looked closer, the harder problem became clear. The funds were not just copies of each other. They had different eligibility rules, application requirements, assessment processes, financial information needs, and internal teams.
The risk was that we would create one neat digital journey that looked simpler for users, but did not actually fit the way the funds worked. That would either confuse applicants or push extra work onto internal teams.
The neat answer would have been to design a single standardised application process. It would have looked cleaner. It would have been easier to explain. But research showed it would not actually fit how the funds worked underneath.
The deeper problem was finding the right level of standardisation: enough consistency to make the service easier for businesses, but enough flexibility to respect the real differences between funds, different eligibility, different assessment, different financial information needs, different internal teams.
Without that judgement, the service risked moving friction rather than removing it, pushing complexity from applicants onto the teams assessing applications, or vice versa.
In discovery I spent more time on research: assumption mapping, digital inclusion surveys, user interviews, synthesis, and understanding different applicant groups. I paid particular attention to small and medium-sized businesses, what they needed, where they lacked confidence, how they understood funding language, and how much effort they could realistically put into an application. The research is what shifted the team away from a fake-simple answer towards understanding where the funds were genuinely the same and where they needed to vary.
The work showed that a single neat application journey would not fit every fund. Eligibility, assessment, financial information, and internal ownership varied enough that the service needed controlled flexibility rather than false standardisation.
SMEs often had less time, less confidence, and less experience applying for government funding. The service had to make language, eligibility, evidence requirements, and next steps clearer without removing the detail assessors needed.
Research helped separate avoidable friction from necessary complexity. The design challenge was not to make every fund identical, but to make the differences understandable and manageable for applicants and internal teams.
One option would have pushed ambiguity onto internal teams after submission. I challenged that because it would have moved the problem rather than solved it. A good service needed to work on both sides of the application.
The project moved from a broad ambition of "make one funding service" to a more realistic understanding of what that service needed to do.
We showed where the application journey could be made simpler and more consistent, but also where different funds needed different questions, routes, or support. This helped the team avoid building a service that looked joined-up but would have failed in practice.
The work passed discovery and alpha assessment and gave the team a clearer basis for moving into the next phase.