Redesigning Togo's Government Services Portal

The Challenge

Government services are inherently sprawling and bureaucratic — hundreds of disconnected procedures, each with its own paperwork, office, and audience. The core UX problem wasn't just visual design, it was information architecture: how do you make hundreds of unrelated administrative services feel like one coherent, navigable system for two very different audiences — everyday citizens and businesses/institutions?

Approach

Services are organized into digestible, card-based domains rather than a flat directory — grouping related procedures (Education & Training, Employment & Social Security, Papers & Citizenship, Taxation/Land/Customs, Health & Social Protection, Justice, Security, etc.) so users can browse by life situation instead of hunting through a bureaucratic index.

Impact

Revamping the experience

After collecting feedback from users, we got the green light from the administration to address the underlying issues. Years of patching the existing platform had built up significant UX debt — so instead of another round of fixes, we went for a full redesign.

Early redesign exploration — carried forward the platform's core visual identity while the underlying structure changed underneath it.

Introducing AI mode

Even with a unified search, some users still couldn't find what they needed — or weren't sure how to phrase it. For them, we introduced AI Mode: a conversational alternative where users can describe what they're trying to do in plain language, get pointed to the right service, and have the AI fill out the form on their behalf using their account data, asking only for what it doesn't already have.

When a request is ambiguous, the assistant surfaces a shortlist of matching services instead of guessing.

Users can upload a file on request, or on their own initiative — useful when a document is easier to show than describe.

AI responses are either open-ended text or constrained to a set of options, depending on what the step requires.

Introducing spaces

Removing the B2C/B2B split surfaced a new problem: business account management. For recurring services, business owners often didn't have time to manage everything themselves, and handing over full account access to someone else was a real security risk.

On the personal side, we found a parallel issue: many people were handling procedures on behalf of family members who were too young, too old, or simply not comfortable navigating a digital platform — children, siblings, parents.

That's why we introduced spaces. A user can create a space linked to their account to manage procedures on someone else's behalf, then hand that space over to them as their own account once they're ready. Anyone can also add an editor to their account for shared, controlled access.

Through the dashboard, a user can manage their own spaces and the ones they're affiliated with. Requests, statuses, and upcoming appointments consolidated in one dashboard.