Modernising Export for Kiwi Businesses

Every day, New Zealand exporters send off some of our finest wine, meat, dairy to the world. But behind each shipment is a maze of paperwork, outdated systems, and manual checks. For many exporters, certification as the final green light before a product leaves the country has been a stressful experience.

Excel sheets, emails, and PDFs create a mix of confusion, double-handling, rework, and delays. One exporter told us, "I spend more time figuring out how to certify than getting the product ready." MPI knew this had to change. The system is used daily by 10,000+ businesses and underpins over $50 billion of national GDP each year. They partnered with Deloitte to reimagine their export certification system and enhance the exporter experience.

MY ROLE

I led design for a 2-year, multi-million dollar transformation of New Zealand’s export certification system, replacing three outdated platforms with one scalable web app. Working from strategy through to delivery, I was responsible for:

• Aligning design to product vision, roadmap, and regulatory goals
• Driving co-design across 200+ workshops with government and industry stakeholders
• Leading UX for build: IA, design system, workflows, and form architecture
• Participant with 50+ users across industries to reduce risk and drive adoption
• Managing and mentoring a distributed design team through delivery

This was a rare opportunity to modernise a critical government service from the ground up, making compliance easier, faster, and more transparent for New Zealand’s exporters.

CONTEXT

Certification is the final step before a product leaves the country

Typically, a product goes through several steps, starting from source production, processing, and storage until a government agency checks the traceability of all previous stages and puts a digital stamp on the consignment for overseas shipment. The export certificate can also be used by the importer and customer to verify the source of origin.

PROBLEM

Each commodity has its own export system, making things extremely inefficient, and many exports are still handled manually

Many systems were built a long time ago and have become bulky. MPI realised that the old system could no longer meet the scaling requirements of exports and posed too much risk for New Zealand’s economy.

OBJECTIVES

Designing for simplicity: The future of certification 

The goal was to replace 3 legacy systems with one intuitive platform. The design team led the front-end transformation, co-designed with industry professionals, and was fully embedded in development cycles.

Information Architecture

Looks different, feels immediately familar

With a 75% success rate in Treejack test with industry users demonstrate significantly improves the user experience and cohesive structure to nagigate through app for exporters nationwide, which led to successful buy-ins from MPI clients, setting a clear direction for application design.

~breathe~

Brand Extension

BRAND PERSONALITY

“How do we want exporters to feel when they use this?”

Clients are not designers. The workshop elevated discussions beyond visuals, focusing on the desired brand perception with the goal of creating a cohesive design across all MPI digital channels. Using the 5-brand-personality framework and examples the client responded best to, we translated those feelings such as credible, calm, supportive into style tiles for the overall look and feel, with clean official typography, thoughtful spacing, and harmonious colours.

CONCEPT

Making trust visible

We made it easy to showcase how the new navigation fits within the updated style, including mobile design. This helped guide the client through the new design language before fully committing to design library development.

~breathe~

Mid Level Design

CHANLLENGE

As a multi-market multi-commodity compliance solution, form designs should be efficient and scalable

We identified the need to build 1,000+ forms, and the programme’s default position was to standardise all fields and labels. But this was later proven to be completely unusable for some industries and would be a data migration nightmare!

FORM TAXONOMY

Mapping which fields are shared, partially shared, or unique across commodities.

As design lead, I was concerned about the one-size-fits-all model and led the pivot toward a flexible system built for industry-specific adaptability:

Standardising: Universally used fields across all industries (e.g. exporter ID, certificate number) are easier to manage in the same table when they share core labels. Similarly, foundational concepts like products, consignments, and declarations are also shared across industries and industry responded well to that.

Flexibility: Some industry-specific fields are printed on export certificates and have legal implications, so they must be unchanged. I also dived deep into analysing commodity needs e.g. wine bottling vs. meat transfer. While both are technically traceable processes, we received extremely low usability scores when we tried merging in a prototype. The design process uncovered this risk, and we pivoted to modular industry-specific templates.

Tailored experience: We built an entry point based on commodity type and destination market to narrow down the form template. This gave industry users their own forms and familiar workflows, making the experience more precise and intuitive.

RELEASE 1

Designing the MVP: Start with Wine

Programmed focused the MVP on wine industry as the first step in reshaping the export landscape, Wine is complex and involved testing, bottling, storage, and declarations,  but it's a perfect place to prove the model. 

I led the end-to-end UX delivery and developed user journeys, designed wireframes, and defined and communicated early visuals of how form components adapt to different industries such as process groups, flyouts, and product search that enabled us to deliver value at scale.

~breathe~

Detailed Design

DETAILED DESIGN WORKSHOPS

Facilitating an inclusive design process that uncovers the “why” and enables grounded innovation

I led and facilitated design workshops 2 to 3 times a week in cadence with client industry experts and product leads. We came prepared with domain knowledge, asked thoughtful questions to spark ideas and prioritise what matters most, and captured insights to drive the work forward.

DESIGN LIBRARY

Enabling a scalable, WCAG-compliant digital experience

Our new experience enhances inclusivity and user satisfaction across the board. Using MUI as a cost-effective foundation, I custom-built an on-brand design library.

~breathe~

Usability Testing

DESIGN > INTERVIEW > ITERATE

Building belief, not just usability

Our research and testing went beyond surfacing usability issues and uncover critical risk ahead of time that shaped product roadmap — it introduced a new, customer-led approach that the Ministry hadn’t experienced before. Through consistent engagement with industry users, we helped programme leaders and responsible officers gain confidence not just in the product, but in the broader digital transformation and enabled long-term partnership with the sector.

(Note: My role supported the lead researcher with test planning, prototyping, and running some interviews.)

~breathe~

What I learned

Transforming a system like this isn’t about perfect design

• Navigating trade-offs between ideal UX and real-world constraints
• Facilitating alignment when priorities shiftHelping teams see the big picture, not just the next ticket
• Some features will have little room for negotiation, so please let them go. It’s the only way for people to take your advice seriously when you actually feel strongly about something. ​

Some weeks, we’d throw out designs we loved to meet a new scope. Other times, we’d fight hard to keep a small UX detail that meant a lot to users.​

The result is a product that works, overall it’s a win, and we gain respect from the team for your trusted quality work and resilience.​