Engagement
NIHR / NHS Business Services Authority — Common Research Platform
I provided design leadership on the NIHR Common Research Platform (CRP), defining the end-to-end design strategy to unify Be Part of Research (BPOR) and Join Dementia Research (JDR) under a single, modular service — laying the foundation for a future national research registry.
Engagement objective
The Common Research Platform was a large-scale digital transformation initiative to modernise two legacy NHS research services and bring them together under a shared platform. The challenge was not just technical — it required aligning policy, data, engineering, and user experience across a complex multi-stakeholder programme, while meeting GDS and NHS design standards and serving both public volunteers and institutional research teams.
What I set out to do
- Defined and drove the end-to-end design strategy across discovery and implementation, embedded within a multidisciplinary team of researchers, content designers, developers, and service owners.
- Created a shared design system and reusable interaction patterns for BPOR and JDR, enabling scalability for future research services.
- Led workshops to define the MVP scope, mapping key journeys for volunteer onboarding, study matching, researcher workflows, and governance.
- Improved accessibility, trust, and communication for volunteers while streamlining researcher study setup and reducing manual processes.
- Partnered with policy, data, and engineering teams to ensure alignment across technical architecture, compliance, and user experience.
What the work produced
- Established a modern, white-label platform capable of supporting multiple NIHR research services.
- Reduced study setup time and admin overhead for research teams through better workflows and data integration.
- Enhanced volunteer engagement and retention, with clearer participation journeys and improved communication loops.
- Set a strategic design foundation for NIHR's long-term ambition of a national research registry.
Service disciplines involved