Designing for the public, when it mattered most.
Building citizen-centered services for the Dutch national COVID-19 response
Client
Rijksoverheid / Ministry of Health
Services
Service Design/UX
Summary
When COVID-19 hit the Netherlands, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport faced a challenge that few organizations are ever asked to solve: designing clear, accessible, and trustworthy public services for an entire country, under conditions that were changing by the week. Policy decisions were coming fast, citizen needs were urgent, and the gap between what the government needed to communicate and what people could actually understand and act on was wide.
As a UX and Service Designer embedded in the ministry's Data and Design team within the national COVID-19 crisis unit, the work sat at the intersection of policy and people. For around eighteen months, the focus was on translating complex government decisions into services that ordinary citizens could use, from quarantine registration and enforcement to vaccination outreach and public information. That meant leading and conducting user research, mapping and developing citizen journeys, designing and testing solutions under serious time pressure, and guiding a team of designers through a context that demanded speed, clarity, and constant adaptation. The work was done in close collaboration with the RIVM, regional health services, municipalities, and transport operators, across a stakeholder landscape as complex as any in the public sector.
Challenge
By 2021, the Netherlands was deep into a cycle of outbreaks, restrictions, and recovery. Parliament had made quarantine mandatory for travelers arriving from high-risk areas, and the Ministry of Health needed a workable process for registration, monitoring, and enforcement, one that could be stood up quickly in a politically charged environment with multiple government bodies involved. At the same time, the national vaccination campaign was scaling up, and reaching every citizen, including those hardest to reach, required more than a poster campaign. It required well-designed services that met people where they were.
The core design challenge was not technical. It was human. Citizens were anxious, often confused, and in many cases deeply skeptical. Policy language, no matter how carefully written, rarely translates directly into the kind of plain, trustworthy communication that helps a person know what to do next. And in a crisis, that gap between policy and comprehension has real consequences: missed quarantines, skipped vaccinations, and eroded public trust.
Working inside a government ministry added its own layer of complexity. Decisions that in a commercial context might take weeks required alignment across departments, agencies, and regional bodies, each with their own mandates, their own constraints, and their own ways of working. Moving quickly in that environment, without cutting corners on quality or accessibility, required as much organizational navigation as it did design skill.
Approach
The starting point was always the citizen. Before any design work began, the focus was on understanding what people actually knew, what they were worried about, and what they needed in order to act. That meant running qualitative research continuously throughout the engagement, not as a phase at the start of a project, but as an ongoing practice that kept the work grounded in real needs as the situation evolved.
Interviews were conducted with citizens across different backgrounds and levels of digital confidence. Journey maps were developed to capture the full experience of interacting with government services during the crisis, from the moment someone heard about a new rule to the moment they successfully complied with it or gave up trying. Those maps made the friction visible and gave the whole team, including policy stakeholders, a shared picture of where the experience was falling short.
From those insights, concepts were developed and tested rapidly. Prototypes went in front of real users before any significant development investment was made. Testing was not treated as a validation step at the end of a process; it was built into the rhythm of the work so that poor assumptions could be caught early and corrected before they became live services.
Two of the most significant services to come out of this period were Prikkenzonderafspraak.nl and MijnVraagOverCorona.nl. The first was a platform allowing citizens to get vaccinated without an appointment, integrating regional locations and making vaccination more accessible to groups that formal invitation processes were not reaching. The second brought all COVID-related government information and services together in one place, structured around what citizens actually wanted to know rather than how the government was organized internally. Both required constant iteration based on what users were telling the team through research and testing, and both required careful alignment with the organizations responsible for delivering the underlying services.
Throughout all of this, part of the role was guiding and supporting the broader team of designers working within the crisis unit, making sure the work across different services stayed coherent, user-centered, and connected to what the research was showing.
Outcome
Within four months of the initial engagement, quarantine registration processes had been implemented, vaccination services had been optimized for reach and accessibility, and public communication had been made significantly clearer and more usable. The approach developed during this period became a blueprint for how integrated COVID-19 services could be designed and delivered across the Dutch government.
MijnVraagOverCorona.nl went on to serve millions of citizens, providing a reliable, accessible source of information at a time when clarity and trust were in short supply. For many people, it was the primary way they navigated the government's response to the pandemic.
What this project demonstrated, above all, is that design has a critical role to play in moments of public crisis. Getting policy right is necessary. Getting the experience of that policy right is what determines whether citizens can actually act on it. In a context where speed, complexity, and public trust were all on the line simultaneously, research-driven design was not a nice addition to the process. It was the thing that made the process work.
