Federal Ministry of Education, Nigeria

The context

In mid-2025, I was brought in to lead UX design for a project with the Federal Ministry of Education of Nigeria: the country's first digital Performance Management System (PMS) for federal civil servants. The system would replace the existing annual performance review process — entirely paper-based, manually submitted, and taking weeks to process — with a digital platform accessible to all federal employees and their supervisors.

The scale was significant: over 67,000 employees across every federal ministry, ranging from senior policy officers in Abuja to support staff across field offices in 36 states. The system had to work for all of them — across varying levels of digital literacy, varying hardware, and varying network conditions.

The problem

The existing appraisal process had well-documented failures. Annual appraisal cycles routinely took 6–8 weeks to complete due to manual submission and physical routing between offices. Key issues:

• Paper forms were lost or delayed in transit, causing entire review cycles to stall
• Supervisors had no visibility into the status of forms they'd submitted for further approval
• Employees had no way to track the status of their own appraisal or access historical records
• The Ministry had no aggregate data on performance across departments — no way to identify patterns or inform promotion decisions with data

The brief was to design a system that solved these problems within a fixed timeline, ready to deploy to all 67,000+ employees within 3 months of the engagement starting.

Discovery

I spent the first two weeks embedded with the Ministry's HR and ICT teams in Abuja. I conducted stakeholder interviews with HR directors, department heads, and a cross-section of civil servants at different grades and seniority levels. The research surfaced a key constraint immediately: a large proportion of employees used low-end Android devices on intermittent 3G connections. The system had to be mobile-first, lightweight, and partially functional offline.

I also mapped the existing paper-based process in detail — documenting every step, handoff, approval gate, and stakeholder. This became the foundation for the digital workflow design.

Designing the approval workflow

The core of the system was a structured approval workflow: employee self-assessment → supervisor review → departmental head sign-off → HR final approval. Each step had a defined actor, a defined action, and a defined timeline.

I designed a status-tracking system that gave every participant full visibility into where their appraisal sat in the workflow at any point. Supervisors had a dashboard showing the outstanding reviews in their queue, sortable by deadline and grade. HR had a ministry-wide view with filtering and bulk action capability.

The approval flow was designed to mirror the existing process structure — minimising retraining requirements — while eliminating the manual routing that caused delays. Each approval step triggered an automatic notification to the next actor, with a configurable escalation rule if the step wasn't completed within the defined window.

Employee-facing design

The employee interface had to work for a 55-year-old office administrator in Sokoto state who uses a Tecno Android phone and has limited app experience. I designed the self-assessment flow as a guided, one-question-at-a-time format rather than a long form. Each question had plain-language instructions and a progress indicator. The interface was tested for low-bandwidth environments and the key screens were designed to load fully at 3G speeds under 4 seconds.

All personal appraisal history was accessible from a single home screen — no navigation required to understand where you stood and what action, if any, was required from you.

Admin and reporting layer

Beyond the individual appraisal flow, I designed the Ministry's aggregate reporting layer: dashboards for HR directors showing completion rates, performance distribution by grade and department, and flagged anomalies (e.g., entire departments with no submitted appraisals). This gave the Ministry data it had never had — not just a digital version of the old process, but a tool for genuine people analytics.

What I learned

Government design at national scale forces clarity of thought in a way few other contexts do. The system had to be understood by a user with no app experience, on a slow phone, in a noisy office. Every piece of jargon, every unnecessary step, every ambiguous label — all of it fails visibly at that scale.

The most important design decision was the choice to mirror the existing workflow structure rather than reimagine it. In a government context with 67,000 users who had been doing the process the same way for decades, radical redesign would have created adoption risk that outweighed any UX benefit. The digital system earned its gains from elimination of physical routing — not from UX novelty. Knowing when not to be clever is part of the job.