Graham Sanders Sarah Katz Olviya Silvary
In April 2026, the quarterly Firebreak week began with an unusual pitch: the project Britain Gets Talent. The project presented an opportunity to work with the joint Office for Investment (OfI) and No.10 Global Talent Taskforce. This team wanted to explore how the UK presents its offer online to international talent.
Attracting talented researchers, innovators, investors and businesses to the UK expands the workforce and contributes to growth. However, the global talent market is highly competitive. To persuade people to live, work and invest here, the UK’s offer needs to be easy to access and understand. Their digital experience should build confidence and guide them towards a decision to move here.The project was expected to benefit a range of audiences. For Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) colleagues, this was an opportunity to gain experience working with policy teams and contribute to building business.gov.uk services. The work would contribute to improving the online experience for individuals seeking career opportunities in the UK, benefiting the wider UK economy.
What we didAnswering this project’s call, we met with the Global Talent team to understand their vision of potential digital solutions, including the possibility of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Our task was to understand where global talent experiences pain points in the current digital experience, and to propose evidence-backed solutions that would build confidence.
Before proposing solutions, we needed to understand what attracts people to the UK and where confidence is lost when people consider moving here. The Global Talent team shared their current website landing page, which we reviewed alongside user needs to identify pain points. These insights informed us of practical recommendations to help the team strengthen their offering.
Given Firebreak’s time-limited nature, we also produced a few indicative design concepts. These were intentionally high‑level and exploratory, intended to illustrate how the problem might be addressed. We highlighted where the Global Talent team could clarify how they want to represent their different services, including areas where user research insights would benefit design decisions.
DiscoveriesThe Global Talent team seeks to attract diverse user groups, including:
researchers innovators investors businesses at different stagesWhile these user groups have different goals, a common issue emerged. Information on how and why to move to the UK is fragmented across multiple sources. Users struggle to find the right information or access appropriate support and often perceive the process as complex and time-consuming. Some users have also reported feeling unwanted or unwelcome by the UK because of a frustrating online experience. The Global Talent team is actively working to address this perception. Designing a digital product around user needs can reduce these frustrations and make the UK’s offer clearer and more welcoming to global talent considering a move.
The Global Talent team wants to establish an online presence that acts as a single source of information to support international talent in choosing to come to the UK.
Our discovery suggested that the solution should:
improve clarity through clear, intuitive signposting make it clear what data is collected and why support the needs of different users reflect the wider Global Talent landscape across and beyond government.Above all, the solution should offer a coherent, frictionless experience. It needs to build confidence at crucial decision-making stages, as people evaluate whether the UK is right for them.
Design conceptsTo explore how the problem might be addressed, we considered 3 indicative design approaches:
Evolving the existing Global Talent landing pages into a single, coherent website, with a clear and distinct presence for each Global Talent team. Content would be organised around evidence-based user journeys, shaped by user needs and data insights. A future iteration could use signals such as a user’s location or area of expertise to personalise content and tailor journeys. This could help users more quickly access information relevant to them. An example of how a digital tool could tailor content based on the user’s area of expertise. This is an indicative design concept, not a real screenshot from Business.gov.uk. A potential AI integration was explored to enable users to quickly and easily surface relevant information that already exists across GOV.UK, without duplicating content. Key to this solution, however, is content availability, as the AI response will depend on source quality. This problem has been discussed in an earlier blog post. Consider a future iteration of the website that integrates AI capability, enabling users to access relevant information already available quickly and easily across other GOV.UK sites. This is an indicative design concept, not a real screenshot from Business.gov.uk. Impact and next stepsThe Global Talent team now has clearer evidence of where users lose confidence, and direction for how they can remove those pain points.
The next step for this project is to progress to a properly scoped plan, focused on understanding the end‑to‑end customer experience. In line with our recommendation, the project will adopt a user-centred approach, without defaulting immediately to AI.
Taken together, this discovery highlighted a broader lesson about how we approach digital problems. When AI is one of several available solutions, discovery work is essential to informing how and where digital solutions should be applied.
‘Working with the DDaT team on the Firebreak project was hugely valuable. One of the most useful aspects was seeing how they structured the work to clearly scope and test audience pain points before jumping to solutions. This approach is already influencing how we pitch our requirements internally and will help ensure anything we build genuinely addresses our audience’s key needs. The future-facing examples and creative ideas shared were also extremely helpful. We’re already using the mock-ups internally to communicate the type of tool we think is needed. A big thank you to the team for their excellent work.’
Danielle Davis-Booth
Senior Policy Advisor in Global Talent Hub
What our Firebreak project showedFirebreak allowed us to bring a fresh perspective to the Global Talent team. We were able to act like their mirror, reflecting their goals along with unanswered questions. This showed where they could communicate to make their online service meet each team’s needs.
In just one week, we demonstrated the value of considering the problem first. By diving into previous research and speaking with stakeholders across multiple teams, we discovered a gap in communication about what each team, and their respective users, needed from an online service. We grounded initial design in real user needs.
This work highlights a common trap in digital delivery: reaching for AI too early. Without a clear understanding of user needs and the underlying problem, AI risks masking confusion rather than resolving it. Our short discovery phase reinforced that effective digital solutions start with clarity, shared understanding and problem‑first thinking. AI is most valuable when it is applied deliberately to support a clearly defined need.
In conclusion: start with the problem, not the technologyIf you are facing a similar challenge, and want to improve a digital service, consider these 3 tips that we learned from this project:
Ask the right questions: who is using this page, where do they need to go, and how do teams and services want to be represented on the page? Be clear on the customer experience you want to create. Remove friction and guide users towards action Use AI deliberately to support a well-defined need, not to solve an undefined problemContact the digital team in your department to see how a collaboration like this can yield evidence-backed and achievable solutions.
Special thanks to:
Katie Pether, Service Owner in DDaT, for pitching the Firebreak week project Mercedes White, Head of Delivery in the Global Talent team for introducing us to the team Danielle Davis-Booth, Senior Policy Advisor in the Global Talent team for being our primary contact throughout the project seen at 10:42, 5 May in Digital trade.