Dakia - Lagos State Government Project

Dakia is a multi-portal operational platform built for Lagos State Government to manage employee recognition, approvals, supplier coordination, fulfilment operations, and delivery workflows across 30+ departments.

I initially led the design of the V1 admin portal that helped secure MVP approval, and later continued contributing to the wider product as part of the Affluent Technology team working across research, workflows, wireframes, prototyping, and iterative product improvements.

Client	Lagos State Government
Role	Lead UX Designer (V1 Admin Portal) / Product Design Team
Product Type	Enterprise Workflow Platform
Departments	30+ Government Departments
Duration	~1 Year
Status	Live / Operational Testing

Understanding the Operational Ecosystem

Dakia was not a single-user product. It was a connected operational ecosystem built to coordinate employee recognition, approvals, supplier fulfilment, budgeting, and delivery workflows across Lagos State Government.

The platform needed to support multiple operational roles, each with very different responsibilities:

Admin Portal

Managing employee records, department structures, gifting allocations, approvals, policies, budgets, and operational oversight.

Supplier Portal

Managing gift inventory, fulfilment requests, and supplier-side order handling.

Hub / Fulfilment Portal

Coordinating logistics, delivery processing, dispatch workflows, and operational exceptions.

Employee Experience

Receiving communications, notifications, and gifting outcomes.

The challenge was not simply designing interfaces, but simplifying a highly interconnected system without overwhelming users with operational complexity.

Designing Clarity Within Operational Complexity

The biggest challenge in Dakia was not designing a single interface, it was simplifying an interconnected operational system with multiple workflows, heavy datasets, approval logic, fulfilment dependencies, and role-specific responsibilities.

The platform needed to support:

• large employee datasets across 30+ departments

• bulk employee imports and classification management

• gifting allocation logic and budget controls

• automated approval workflows and policy-driven operations

• supplier coordination and fulfilment management

• logistics tracking through fulfilment hubs

• delivery exception handling and operational visibility

Each role required access to different levels of information, while the overall system still needed to feel understandable and manageable.

The UX challenge was balancing complexity with clarity, ensuring users could complete operational tasks efficiently without being overwhelmed by the scale of the system.

Complex systems do not need complex user experiences.

Product Design Approach

Because Dakia involved multiple operational roles, approval dependencies, budget controls, and fulfilment workflows, the design process started with understanding how the system needed to function before designing interfaces.

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Rather than approaching this as a screen-first project, I worked closely with stakeholders to map workflows, operational requirements, and approval logic across the ecosystem.

This included:

• stakeholder sessions to understand departmental needs and operational expectations

• mapping employee allocation and fulfilment journeys

• defining approval workflows and automation logic

• structuring policy-driven operational flows

• shaping dashboard requirements around tracking, visibility, and budget oversight

• translating complex operational requirements into usable digital workflows

The focus was not simply building screens, but designing a system that could handle operational complexity without becoming difficult to use.

Rethinking Large-Scale Employee Onboarding

One of the biggest operational challenges in Dakia was managing large-scale employee data efficiently across multiple departments.

The initial approach relied on department heads manually preparing structured spreadsheets containing employee records, which would then be uploaded into the platform for processing.

While practical as a starting point, it quickly became clear that this created friction.

At this scale, manual dependency on department-level data preparation introduced delays, inconsistencies, and operational overhead.

Rather than treating this as a one-time upload problem, I spent time observing how the workflow behaved in practice following the end-to-end process, identifying friction points, and understanding where operational effort was being lost.

This led to a shift in thinking.

Instead of relying entirely on external data preparation, the workflow evolved toward more manageable admin-side data control, giving operational teams better visibility, flexibility, and control over employee allocation processes.

The biggest lesson here was that scalable systems are rarely solved by simply digitising existing manual workflows they often need the workflow itself to be redesigned.

Digitising a broken manual process does not automatically create a better system.

Final Product Experience

The admin experience was designed as the operational control centre for Dakia, giving teams visibility into employee data, gifting allocation, fulfilment workflows, and delivery operations at scale.

The focus was creating clarity across a highly data-heavy ecosystem while keeping everyday workflows manageable for operational teams.

1. Operational Dashboard

The dashboard was designed to give administrators immediate visibility into allocations, deliveries, pending fulfilment activity, operational exceptions, and department-level performance.

With large employee datasets and multiple operational dependencies, surfacing the right information clearly was critical for day-to-day decision-making.

2. Bulk Employee Management

Managing employee records at this scale required workflows built for efficiency.

Bulk onboarding, structured data handling, employee classification, and operational status management were designed to reduce repetitive manual work while improving administrative control.

3. Department Analysis & Oversight

Because gifting allocations, budgets, and employee distribution varied across departments, the platform needed visibility beyond individual records.

Administrative teams could track department performance, allocation progress, and operational distribution to support planning and governance.

4. Hub & Fulfilment Operations

Beyond employee administration, Dakia also needed to support the operational side of fulfilment.

Hub workflows were designed to help operational teams coordinate gift preparation, logistics handling, delivery progress, and issue resolution across the fulfilment process.

MVP Validation & Next Phase Approval

Dakia’s first version was designed as an MVP to validate the operational model, demonstrate the end-to-end workflow, and secure stakeholder approval for broader rollout.

The focus was not delivering the full final ecosystem immediately, but proving that a complex employee recognition and fulfilment workflow could be transformed into a scalable digital operational platform.

Following stakeholder reviews, operational walkthroughs, and product demonstrations, the MVP successfully received approval from Lagos State Government officials to move into the next phase of development.

By June 2025, the platform entered live operational testing across 3 departments, supporting an initial group of 62 employees as part of phased validation.

This pilot helped refine operational workflows, validate product assumptions, and provide the wider delivery team with clearer direction for future scaling.

One of the strongest outcomes was alignment turning a complex idea into a shared operational vision that stakeholders could confidently approve and evolve.