Single Customer Account

The idea sounds simple. One account where you can see and manage everything you have with HMRC, instead of a patchwork of sites and portals. HMRC saw it as better for taxpayers and cheaper to run.

Our team was asked to design a digital service. Then we started researching.

I worked across departments to understand how people deal with government online, what they expect around trust, security and convenience, and which of our own assumptions didn't hold up. We kept pushing the question: who is this actually for?

The answer changed the scope. What looked like a citizen need was really a government one: helping HMRC support several tech stacks and making its records consistent. The real barrier wasn't the interface. Public commentary on the programme says the same: fragmented customer data and legacy systems are what hold it back.

So we stopped designing a service and built a pattern. A data architecture other HMRC teams could reuse, with user needs and principles for building around it. We left behind clear evidence of what people expect from a one-account experience, user journeys mapped across services and technologies, and prototype patterns for teams across government.

Good research sometimes tells you you're building the wrong thing. That's the cheapest time to hear it.