UI Strategy & Design Systems for National Educational Infrastructure

The Context

Under the Npuls National Growth Fund, the three Dutch educational sectors (MBO, HBO, and WO) are undergoing a massive digital transformation. SURF and Studielink have secured a framework agreement (valued at €37M – €47.7M) to replace legacy systems with a single, flexible joint educational environment focused on Lifelong Learning (LLO).

The Challenge

Translating complex, cross-institutional administrative processes into one uniform and agile digital ecosystem. The interface and architecture must function seamlessly for over 1 million annual students and applications, distributed across dozens of different educational institutions and varied technical frameworks.

The Strategy & Approach

As a UI/UX Designer, I am leading the design transformation by defining the overarching UI strategy. A core component of my role is architecting a organization-wide design system that bridges the gap to engineering for 30+ products across React, Vue, and Angular.

I pivoted my role from pure interface design to strategic advisory. Guiding a 14-person multidisciplinary team, I spearheaded foundational research, stakeholder presentations, and evidence-based workshops. I aggressively focused on building organizational confidence, proving that our overarching, framework-agnostic design system could safely accommodate all complex legacy requirements and bridge the front-end chaos.

The Outcome

Within just three sprints, I successfully mapped the UX architecture and aligned skeptical stakeholders around empirical KPIs. This groundwork has secured organizational buy-in, ensuring that the resulting digital transformation will be accessible, future-proof, and robust enough to handle the national student body.

Lessons Learned

In enterprise-scale digital transformations, organizational alignment is vastly harder than technical implementation. A design system is only successful if you first build the stakeholder trust required to adopt it; you must design the internal consensus before you design the components - and that can take a while.