Essay

Inside-out design

Most digital services are built along the lines of the organisation behind them. You can see it from the outside, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

September 2026

Some time ago I had to register a small rental property with the regional authorities. A legitimate obligation, a modest formality, and on paper a matter of an afternoon. It took considerably longer, and along the way it turned into the most instructive usability study I have done in years — because I was not observing a user this time. I was the user.

Four separate administrations turned out to be involved, each with its own portal, its own login, its own vocabulary and its own list of documents. There was no shared file, no common procedure, no single point of contact. One portal asked for a number that only another portal could issue; that other portal, in turn, wanted a document that a third would only release later. Nothing was broken, exactly. Everything worked as designed. That was the problem.

An organisation chart you can click through

What I was walking through was not a service. It was an organisation chart with a login screen at every door. Every internal boundary between departments had become a boundary the citizen has to cross, carrying the paperwork across it himself. The inability of four services to cooperate had been faithfully translated into the one place where it hurts most: the moment someone is trying to do the right thing.

What I was walking through was not a service. It was an organisation chart with a login screen at every door.

This is what I mean by inside-out design: a service built from the logic of the people who run it, rather than from the logic of the person using it. It is rarely a decision anybody made. It is what happens when nobody makes the opposite decision. And it shows up in four recognisable ways.

The database shows through

Web addresses full of session identifiers, system names and query parameters put the internal architecture on display in the address bar. What someone sees there should describe where they are in their own journey, not the topology of a back office. A readable, stable address is not a cosmetic detail: it is the difference between a page you can bookmark, share or return to and one you can only reach by starting over.

The organisation talks about itself

Home pages give generous room to identity, mission and structure, and comparatively little to what the visitor actually came to do. The hierarchy of a page is a confession: it shows whose priorities were in the room. Someone arriving at a service wants to know what to do next. Who you are matters to them only in as far as it helps them do it.

The silos are mirrored

Each department gets its own portal, its own sign-in, its own house style, its own list of frequently asked questions, and no links to the others. From the inside this looks like autonomy. From the outside it looks like being sent from counter to counter in a building where nobody has a map. Shared files and interoperability are not a technical luxury; they are what turns a collection of systems into a service.

The implicit user

Running through all of it is an assumption about who is on the other end: someone fluent in these systems, familiar with the terminology, at ease with the procedure. And, though no specification ever says so, someone with time: an afternoon to spare, the patience to try again after a session expires, and the willingness to read three sets of frequently asked questions to find one answer. That assumption is understandable — it describes the people who build and operate the thing. It also quietly excludes everyone else: the farmer renting out a room, the pensioner at the coast, the self-employed person on the road, the non-resident abroad. A service reaches everyone only when it is designed for the person least familiar with it, not for the person who uses it every day.

Why it happens

A service reaches everyone only when it is designed for the person least familiar with it.

Rarely through indifference. Usually through history. Systems are designed for the audience an organisation has always had — the professional, the company with an accountant, the frequent user — and then the world adds a new category of people the forms were never meant for. The procedure is extended to them; the service is not. Seen from the inside, nothing appears to be wrong: the regulars still get through — the companies, the accountants, the people who file every quarter. It is the newcomers who get stuck: the first-timers, the once-in-a-lifetime applicants, the small operators with nobody to ask. And they are the last people to complain: someone doing something for the first time assumes the fault is his own, not the system’s.

That explains it and settles nothing. Whoever decides to include a new group takes on the obligation to serve it. Otherwise the requirement lands on people the system has no way of helping, and their failure to comply is counted against them rather than against the design.

What it costs

People give up. Quietly, without complaining, without appearing in any statistic. The ones who persist are the ones with the time, the confidence or the professional support to persist — which means a service of this kind sorts its users by something other than their rights or their obligations. And when a great many people fail at the same step, that is not a fact about them. It is a measurement of the design, and the most useful one an organisation will ever get for free.

Turning it outside-in

None of the remedies are exotic. One file, one procedure, one point of contact, whatever the internal division of labour. Addresses and words that describe the user’s journey rather than the machinery. A page that opens with what you need to do. A route for people who cannot or will not go through the digital front door — and telling them it exists, rather than waiting for them to ask. Help before you require; a warning before a penalty. And one modest test that outranks every audit: give the task to someone who has never done it before, and watch without helping. You will know within ten minutes where your organisation chart has surfaced.

The fragmentation is not, in the first place, a technical problem. The technology to share a file between departments has existed for thirty years. What is missing is the decision that the person on the outside comes first — and that decision is not made by designers. It is made, or not made, several floors up.

This is the kind of reading I do for organisations: your website, product or service seen through the eyes of the person who has to use it, in writing, with the reasons and the fixes attached. See what that involves, or email me at hello@alligatordesign.net.