GIZ GovStack Website Redesign

GovStack is an open-source initiative run by GIZ, ITU and SDEV that helps governments design and build digital services. The website had stopped reflecting what the project does. Around 200 volunteer experts meet weekly to write open technical specifications, and none of that was visible to the public. The GovMarket showed the same solutions in the same order on every visit.

I joined in July 2025 and ran two discovery workshops for kick-off.

Three different user groups arrived at one website that served none of them well.

Government officials landing on the homepage could not tell within a minute what GovStack did or why it mattered to them. The tech community had no public presence at all, because meeting schedules, decision records and working group pages lived in Confluence and Slack where a newcomer would never find them. Software providers did not understand compliance levels or why a listing mattered.

GovMarket carried a fourth problem. One tool appeared first on every page load, on a site whose whole premise is neutrality between solutions.

The redesign covered four areas. The landing page is structured around GovStack’s value proposition. The Working Groups hub brings the tech community’s activity out of Confluence and into public view. GovMarket gained building block filters and a randomised listing order. A custom illustration set gives abstract technical concepts a consistent visual language across all of it.

I Workshop

The first workshop was a live session on Miro. The team worked through the landing page and site structure in real time and produced five versions of the layout, each framing the value proposition differently. The board moved from rough navigation sketches to specific wireframes, resolving some questions and surfacing others: what goes above the fold, how explicit the step-by-step journey should be, how to give officials and community members equally clear entry points from the same page.

II Workshop

The second workshop went wide across site priorities: GovMarket filters, the logo wall, world map concepts, landing page structure and the Events section. Martha had been sketching a rough landing page layout on a beach in Estonia, and that sketch fed the direction we landed on. Ali, who manages all working group and specification work at GovStack, walked the team through how the groups actually function week to week. She had already built a working prototype on a static site generator, and she shared the IETF working group model as a reference for what a public community page could hold: name, charter, members, calendar, minutes and specifications in one place.

Timeline

Before any design work I mapped the project scope and sequence: which sections to redesign, in what order, and where design decisions connected to the development pipeline. That map became the reference for the whole engagement.

User Research

Ali’s walkthrough changed how I read the three user groups. Their paths are not independent. A government official, a contributor and a software provider often move through connected parts of the same system, which means one feature can serve more than one group. The building block filter in GovMarket came out highest priority, flagged by two groups at once. We classified the features into MVP, first iteration and to consider later.

Design System

GovStack already had a style guide. I extracted the palette, typography and base components from it and extended them into a working system without inventing a new visual language. Consistency across four separate areas mattered more here than novelty.

Hero Section

Stakeholders’ brief was direct: government users need to understand what GovStack offers before they scroll anywhere. Three hero approaches tested different framings of that. This element went through more rounds than anything else in the project, because a wrong first impression loses the user before they reach any of the rest.

Landing Page

The final structure follows a simple order: value proposition, then a step-by-step explanation of how GovStack works, then clear paths into the three main sections. The slides here show the intermediate decisions, including two rounds that got cut before the final version was approved.

Working Groups Hub

Around 200 volunteer experts meet weekly to write open technical specifications, the blueprints for digital wallets, identity systems and more. None of that work appeared on the website.

Ali and I mapped the full architecture live in Mural before wireframing: how working groups feed specifications, how specifications connect to GovMarket listings, and how country engagement cycles back. The system turned out more connected than the website suggested. Getting it on paper was the most useful thirty minutes of the whole discovery phase.

Ali also clarified something I had not grasped until that session. These are not internal team pages. They are meant to be public, discoverable, and clear enough that a newcomer can orient themselves without interrupting the weekly meeting.

Wireframes / UI Final

The hub shows every active group at a glance. A group’s detail page carries member profiles linked to LinkedIn, upcoming meeting dates with calendar integration, meeting minutes and published specifications. Anyone can read it, and joining a meeting takes one click after filling in the application form.

GovMarket

GovMarket lists software and service providers compliant with GovStack specifications. Three changes addressed Nico’s objection directly. Every listed solution is tied to one or more building blocks, so an official looking for identity software can filter instead of scrolling. Listings carry richer metadata per solution. Display order randomises on every page load, so no single tool holds first position.

Illustrations

GovStack’s visual language is minimal, and abstract concepts like building blocks needed something readable that did not look corporate. I designed two illustration families: one for specification and building block pages, one for the working group hub.

A specification document for a digital wallet is dense and deliberately dry. An illustration at the top of the page gives a reader context before they hit the technical content. The working group set gives the community hub a human quality the Confluence pages never had. Both families use the GovStack palette and the same line weight, so they read as one system.

The project is still running, and three user groups now have distinct paths through the site. Four major sections were redesigned. The Working Groups hub made 15 or more active groups publicly visible for the first time. GovMarket was rebuilt with building block filters across more than 60 solutions and a randomised listing order. The design system was extended from the existing style guide and applied across every redesigned section.