Service and Interaction Design Lead, UK Government – Department for International Trade
Check How to Export Goods: Making complex trade rules usable
Helping UK and international businesses find and understand trade rules
Context and Challenge
When the UK left the EU, exporters lost access to the European Commission’s TARIC database, the primary source of truth for duties, tariffs, and documentation. Overnight, thousands of businesses needed a reliable UK-owned alternative.
We created two GOV.UK services:
Check how to export goods
Moving goods into the UK
Both had to launch immediately after Brexit to keep trade moving at a time of significant uncertainty.
We designed and delivered both services from a shared design system, service patterns, and codebase, ensuring fast delivery and avoiding divergence as rules evolved.
Insight
Policy content has to be precise, but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard to use.
The key was finding the balance between what policy needed to say and how people actually searched for it.
User research showed that:
businesses start with country and product, not legislation
people want clarity first, detail second
confidence comes from predictable structure and consistent patterns
The solution was not simplifying the law, but structuring it in a way people naturally think and search, making rules findable, scannable, and dependable.
Approach
One foundation, two services
Built both services from a shared design and technical base to ensure stability, consistency, and rapid iteration.A clear three-step pattern
Designed a clear three-step journey pattern: choose country, search for goods, view duties, taxes and paperwork. This pattern became a reusable model across GOV.UK for complex, rules-based trade journeys.Support for different levels of expertise
Supported different levels of expertise through predictive search, HS code browsing and an A–Z index, so new exporters and advanced brokers could use the service equally well.Structured for trust
Designed policy pages that surface top-level duties and taxes, required paperwork and rules and exceptions with deeper detail layered underneath.Policy + design working together
Collaborated closely with policy, legal and data teams to ensure accuracy while maintaining usability and consistency.Kept businesses informed
Added GOV Notify alerts so businesses could stay informed when trade rules for the goods changed.
Outcomes
Two GOV.UK services launched immediately after Brexit, maintaining continuity for UK and overseas traders.
Provided the foundation for the Import goods into the UK service and influenced wider GOV.UK design patterns for business users.
Created reusable approaches for complex, data-heavy policy content that made information findable and dependable.
Improved task success to over 85% and reduced average completion time by half through iterative testing and design of the journey and search model.
Helped thousands of businesses continue trading confidently during a period of major policy change.
