§ 01TL;DR
80%+ of users find the product they're looking for.
We designed a service on great.gov.uk that helps UK small businesses discover where to export their products. From product classification to export planning, launched on schedule for a ministerial announcement.
§ 02The brief
great.gov.uk is the UK government's platform for helping businesses sell overseas. The Department for International Trade had trade data from every department, but no way to make it useful. Existing content was scattered across multiple services with no coherent journey. The Head of Content Design wanted something that felt genuinely helpful, not another data dump in government branding.
I want to easily uncover reliable export data on different markets
so that I can make an informed decision about where to export my product
§ 03The work
We designed the end-to-end user journey, from product classification to export planning, with content that made complex trade data feel accessible. The timeline was driven by a ministerial announcement: eight weeks to soft launch. We ran discovery and design in parallel, sharing wireframes with the content team twice weekly.
Classification
Most businesses don't know their Harmonised System code, the international standard for categorising traded goods. We bridged everyday language and trade taxonomy, letting users describe their product in plain English and progressively narrow down to the right classification. The content had to feel like a conversation, not a form.
Curation
The government had data on hundreds of potential markets. Showing all of them would overwhelm a first-time exporter. We surfaced five suggested markets based on import demand, filtering out impractical options. The framing was crucial: these weren't "results", they were recommendations.
Context
Raw trade figures mean nothing to someone who's never exported. We worked with the content team to decide what to show and what to hide, then wrote contextual labels that helped users interpret the numbers. The goal was to answer the question behind the question: not "what's the GDP?" but "is this market worth my time?"
Continuity
The journey doesn't end at data. Once users have chosen what they're exporting and where, the service guides them to complete their export plan. We designed the content to connect seamlessly with existing great.gov.uk services, so users never hit a dead end.
§ 04What we found
Confidence matters more than completeness.
Users didn't want every possible option. They wanted to feel they were making a sensible choice. This shaped every content decision: the progressive classification flow, the curated market suggestions, the contextual data labels. We focused on building a confidence-builder for nervous first-time exporters, not a comprehensive data explorer.
§ 05Impact
The service launched in May 2021, on time for the ministerial announcement. Thousands of small businesses have used it to explore new markets. The information architecture connects product search, market data, and export planning into a single coherent journey.
We'd been sitting on this trade data for years but couldn't figure out how to make it useful. Mooch helped us see it through the user's eyes. The service finally answers the question every small business asks: which markets should I sell to? Head of Content Design, Department for International Trade