Objective

Public-sector procurement is published as notices. They appear continuously, from unrelated bodies, each with its own opening date, closing date and scope, and a supplier who misses the closing date has not lost the bid; they were never in it.

So a portal listing those notices has one job before any other. Not searching, not filtering, not archiving: making the deadline the thing you cannot fail to see.

Creative response

Portal interface design and wireframing.

• A notice list led by the countdown. The buyer names the row: NHS Commercial Solutions, University College London, the European Commission, Harrogate Borough Council, and the line beneath opens with Days left: 25 set in bold ahead of the opening and closing dates, then a direct link through to the contract notice
• Status filters carrying their own counts, Open (6), Closed (15), Pre-information (9), so the size of the pipeline is visible without running a search
• Country flags per notice, because the list mixes UK bodies with the European Commission and the jurisdiction changes who can bid
• A share panel and a notes panel, sitting side by side on the notice: email a colleague on the left, save internal notes on the right
• A four-city clock across the header, Singapore, Brussels, London, Washington DC, with the working date beside it
• Site map and wireframes, worked to a versioned document before the mock-ups
• Three dated mock-up rounds, 24, 25 and 31 July 2020

Giving days-remaining the front of the detail line, bold, ahead of two dates that are themselves the source of it, is the decision the screen is built on. The dates are the data as published; the countdown is the same fact converted into the only form anybody acts on. A bid team scanning twenty notices reads twenty numbers, not forty dates.

Tabs for All, UK and Europe sit above it rather than as another filter, because jurisdiction decides eligibility and eligibility comes before triage.

Putting counts inside the filter labels does the same thing for the pipeline. Open is a filter; Open (6) is a status report, and it costs nothing to say.

Share and notes as adjacent panels rather than sequential steps reflects how a bid gets made. Somebody reads a notice, forms a view, and needs to do two things at once, tell a colleague and record why. A design that makes those consecutive screens loses the second one every time.

• A notice list led by the countdown. The buyer names the row: NHS Commercial Solutions, University College London, the European Commission, Harrogate Borough Council, and the line beneath opens with Days left: 25 set in bold ahead of the opening and closing dates, then a direct link through to the contract notice
• Status filters carrying their own counts, Open (6), Closed (15), Pre-information (9), so the size of the pipeline is visible without running a search
• Country flags per notice, because the list mixes UK bodies with the European Commission and the jurisdiction changes who can bid
• A share panel and a notes panel, sitting side by side on the notice: email a colleague on the left, save internal notes on the right
• A four-city clock across the header, Singapore, Brussels, London, Washington DC, with the working date beside it
• Site map and wireframes, worked to a versioned document before the mock-ups
• Three dated mock-up rounds, 24, 25 and 31 July 2020

The work