The Royal Navy

Scalable design system for a modern defence force

The Challenge

The Royal Navy's existing website was dated, visually inconsistent, and difficult to manage. With over 500 pages of content, the restrictive CMS workflow severely limited the content team's efficiency.

The primary business and user objectives were to:

  • Appeal to a younger, digitally-native audience to drive recruitment.

  • Enable non-designers to create compelling content at speed.

  • Tell the story of the Royal Navy in a visually engaging, modern way.

Project Details

Role: Experience Design Lead

Partner: Great State

Deliverables: UX/UI Design, Information Architecture, Design System Governance, Stakeholder Management, Developer Handover, Ongoing Design Validation.

Rebuilding from the Ground Up

Given the state of the existing content, we didn't just iterate - we completely restructured the information architecture and navigation, mapping new user journeys that reflected real user needs. I worked closely with a multi-disciplinary team of PMs, developers, and active personnel to ensure the platform remained future-proof.

A Scalable Design System

To solve the consistency and efficiency issues, we rolled out a highly scalable, component-based design system. This balanced structural consistency with the flexibility needed for content teams to independently build highly engaging pages.

Interactive Storytelling & Governance

Beyond structure, we focused on emotional engagement by integrating short, social-style videos and interactive components to showcase vessels, missions, and technology. To ensure flawless execution, I acted as the primary design point of contact for daily developer scrums and led the QA process for page design and multimedia assets

The Impact

11+

Industry awards won, including a Webby Award, Lovie Award, and the Digital Impact Awards Grand Prix.

100%

Increase in CMS users able to independently build and manage pages, significantly reducing design and development bottlenecks.

500+

Pages successfully redesigned using the new scalable templates and design system components, establishing a benchmark for the wider defence sector.