What Three Unrelated Projects Taught Us About Solving Digital Problems | Digital Marmalade [Skip to main content](#main-content) ![](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/pagebuilder/948/download/content_id) One of the first questions new clients ask us is some version of "have you worked in our sector before?" It's fair enough. But after nearly thirty years of building digital products, we've found that sector knowledge matters less than people expect. What matters more is how a team thinks about a problem it hasn't seen before. Three projects make this point better than we could in the abstract. A military research archive. A real-time network platform for a global consultancy. An NHS mental health tracker for parents and carers. Nothing in common — except the team that built all three. The Centre For Evidence - making a large archive usable ------------------------------------------------------- The Centre For Evidence Trust holds one of the largest collections of military and veterans research in the UK, with over 3,000 articles, reports and resources. The problem wasn't a lack of content. It was that the content had become very hard to find. Researchers and policymakers needed to locate relevant material quickly, across a complex range of topics and formats. The [Centre For Evidence project](https://www.centreforevidence.org/) is a good example of a brief where the subject is highly specific but the underlying digital problem is not. How do you design a search and browsing experience that makes a large archive genuinely useful? That's a question we'd worked through before, in different contexts. It was clear thinking about information design that made it work — not specialist knowledge of military research. NTT Consulting - making real-time data readable ----------------------------------------------- NTT Consulting needed a platform to take complex, live network data and make it clear and useful for the people managing global infrastructure. The [NTT platform](../../case-studies/ntt-consulting/real-time-network-lifecycle-insights-and-management-application) had to handle large volumes of data, surface the right information at the right moment, and stay fast under heavy use around the clock. The challenge wasn't understanding the network engineering behind the data. It was building something that could present very technical information without overwhelming the people reading it. That's a software design problem. It looks much the same whether the data is network traffic, logistics or anything else. MyHealthE - designing for a difficult moment -------------------------------------------- [MyHealthE](../../case-studies/nhs-king-s-college-london/a-simple-way-to-track-progress-during-treatment-with-child-and-adolescent-mental-health-services) was built with the NHS and King's College London. It helps parents and carers track a child's progress through mental health treatment. The sensitivity of the context made this one of the harder design briefs we've worked on. Every choice about tone, layout and notifications had to be weighed against how it might feel to someone reading it during a difficult time. The clinical knowledge came from the NHS and King's College teams. What we brought was the ability to turn that knowledge into a digital experience that felt right for the people using it — which is a different skill, but one that transfers across sectors just as the others do. What this means for your project -------------------------------- The link between all three isn't sector experience. It's a way of working — understanding the real problem before choosing a solution, designing for the person who'll actually use the product, and building things that hold up under real conditions. If you're not sure whether we'll understand your world, get in touch and let's talk it through. [ Back to news ](/news) September 2026 ### [ How a Digital Brand Stays Itself Since 2001 ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/how-a-digital-brand-stays-itself-since-2001) Read more September 2026 ### [ Designing Digital Products for Children: What Changes ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/designing-digital-products-for-children-what-changes) Read more September 2026 ### [ What Makes Interactive Digital Learning Actually Work? ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/what-makes-interactive-digital-learning-actually-work) Read more Allow cookies