LMSM · Product design case study · 2026

Turning a policy question into a defensible, published answer.

LMSM is a governed research and economic modelling workspace for the UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. It connects literature, data, models, simulation, review, and publishing into one traceable flow.

Role

Lead product designer

Scope

Research to design system

Timeline

14 weeks

Team

Cross-functional, 6 people

LMSM economic modelling dashboard showing labour market indicators, approvals, charts, and recent activity

01 · Context and mandate

The work was rigorous. The workflow around it was fragmented.

Economists were answering high-stakes policy questions across shared drives, spreadsheets, Stata, Word, email, and chat. Analysis could be sound while the evidence trail around it became impossible to reconstruct. Leadership’s request for a report builder was only treating the final symptom.

Asked for
A consistent report builder.

Reframed to
Carry a policy question from evidence to a published brief without losing provenance.

02 · Discovery research

I studied the seams before designing the screens.

Eleven contextual interviews, six rebuild-your-last-brief sessions, an artifact audit of fourteen policy briefs, and a five-day tool-switch diary separated what people said from what the workflow actually demanded.

tools touched in one analysis

31%

of time spent moving and reformatting data

31%

of time spent moving and reformatting data

4/14

briefs with a fully traceable headline number

4/14

briefs with a fully traceable headline number

baseline usability score for the old toolchain

03 · The design response

One workspace, designed around a continuous chain of evidence.

The final information architecture follows the real reasoning flow: discover evidence, prepare governed data, build a model, compare scenarios, review the result, and publish a brief. Every handoff preserves the source, owner, version, and decision context.

One workspace, two role lenses

Economists build and Directors interrogate. The interface changes emphasis without splitting the product or the evidence trail.

Provenance as a first-class interaction

Figures expose source, transformation, model version, and reviewer history directly in context instead of hiding them in metadata screens.

Modelling without losing the policy question

Parameters, scenarios, assumptions, and outputs stay attached to the original question so the final brief can always explain how an answer was produced.

04 · Outcomes and reflection

A faster workflow mattered. A defensible workflow mattered more.

The concept reduced the estimated time from question to first-draft brief by 63%, raised the simulated usability score from 58 to 84, and made every published figure traceable to its source. The deeper lesson was that trust is not a compliance layer added at the end; it has to be visible in the interaction model from the beginning.

−63%

estimated time from question to first draft

−63%

estimated time from question to first draft

simulated final usability score

100%

published figures traceable to source

100%

published figures traceable to source

Research figures and participant quotes are illustrative simulations for portfolio storytelling; the product and design work are real.