Ministry of Education: Sigillo, end to end
Valerio Donfrancesco
National digital platforms for Italy's Ministry of Education and Merit and Infocamere, used daily by millions of students, teachers and school staff. Through Prisma Progetti, I was UX/UI designer and lead of three frontend developers.
The problem
Public digital services grown by accretion: inconsistent flows between systems, bureaucratic language, no shared library across vendors, and no effective way of organising work between the teams.
My role
Two roles at once: UX/UI designer on the flows and interfaces, and lead of three frontend developers across parallel projects. I set the shared design system and workflows, agreed priorities with product and engineering, and wrote the specs for the design-to-dev handover. With no working organisation between the teams, I set one up in Asana, bringing the tickets of every team into one place.
The process, end to end.
Research and validation: evidence on both sides of the redesign
Before designing, I ran heatmap tests on the pages people were using, to have a baseline of where attention and clicks went. The same test, repeated on the redesign, let us compare before and after on the same terms instead of arguing about taste.
The proposals were presented in calls with executives of the Ministry and of Leonardo, walking through interactive Axure prototypes rather than static screens, so decisions were taken on the real behaviour of each flow, including its empty and error states.
Information architecture: work organised by what you have to do
In Sigillo, the e-signature platform for school staff, the navigation follows the state of a document, not the office that sent it: what to fill in, what to sign, what is waiting for someone else, and what is done.
Sigillo's structure, on the official .italia design system.
Flow: one way to sign, whatever the document
A single document, one that needs several signers in a set order, and a bulk signature for administrators all go through the same detail page and the same SPID step, so nobody learns the product twice. Documents waiting for earlier signatures stay visible with an explanation instead of disappearing.
Three ways in, one path to a signed document.
Documents to sign: dates first, one primary action, filters beside the list.
Bulk signature: one acknowledgement and one SPID step for all the selected documents.
A/B test: the same heatmap test on both versions
The heatmap test run on the existing pages, where attention and clicks went, was repeated on the redesign under the same conditions, so the two versions were compared on the same terms. The original heatmap exports are not shown, and side A is a schematic reconstruction of the pages before the redesign, not a screenshot.
A: the pages before the redesign, as a schematic reconstruction. B: Sigillo after the redesign.
Key decisions
Design system first, screens second: with several vendors on the same ecosystem, agreeing components and rules up front cost time at the start and paid it back on every project after.
One shared direction built on the official .italia design system: compliance with the national standard, and recognisable paths from one section to the next.
Document for people who were not in the room: every component carries states, edge cases and accessibility notes, so the system survives a change of vendor.
Outcome
After the redesign, use of Sigillo went up 200% and the average rating in the Ministry's user surveys rose from 2.5 to 4.5 out of 5. One design system is now shared by several vendors, and post-delivery revision rounds went from several per release to one.
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Posted Oct 6, 2026
Sigillo and a shared design system for the Ministry of Education: heatmaps before and after, prototype reviews, Asana. Use +200%, rating 2.5 to 4.5 of 5.
