Brasil Participativo SaaS

We turned Brasil Participativo into a SaaS that cities, ministries and civil society groups can run on their own, each with its own space and identity. With little time to deliver an MVP, we prioritized where design could do the most with the least development cost: the mobile experience, the admin panel and the gov.br visual identity. The platform launches in October 2026. The usability and beta test script is being written, so this case reports design decisions, not measured results yet.

Brasil Participativo is the Brazilian federal government's social participation platform, built on Decidim, an open-source participation software. The project aimed to turn it from a single platform into a product that many institutions could adopt.

I started on the project as a UX Designer and today I am the Lead Product Designer. On the SaaS I acted as the team's technical lead and stayed hands-on in the design work, setting priorities and trade-offs with the team and also producing screens, components and documentation myself.

The SaaS lets more cities, city halls, ministries and organized social groups use the software on their own. A city, for example, gets a tenant that we create, but the city maintains it completely and builds its own participatory processes on it. Each entity can customize the platform, within limits, to match its interests and visual identity.

The goal is to encourage digital social participation and make participatory processes more democratic, by taking the platform out of one institution's hands and making it available to many.

The first step was a benchmark of 10 independent Brazilian platforms that offer social participation in some way. It showed that our software offers more participation tools than any of them, which is a clear advantage in the number of features. It also showed that many of these platforms work more as transparency and follow-up portals than as spaces to participate, with mixed content and results that are hard to find.

That shaped the design work: the question was less what to add and more how to make what already exists usable by the people who would run it themselves.

Decidim was not designed for mobile. Most people in Brazil access the internet through their phones, and in Brasil Participativo analytics (July 9 to 16, 2026) 62% of views came from mobile: 261.4K against 157.8K on desktop. Mobile became a priority.

With only a short time to deliver an MVP, we did not redesign everything:

1. Mapped the Decidim design system to see which components already worked on mobile and which did not.
2. Adapted or created components for the ones that did not.
3. Designed mobile screens only for the flows where a responsive layout alone was not enough.
4. Tested responsiveness on a range of devices to make sure the experience met the minimum viable product.

The administrative interface, where each entity builds and runs its participatory processes, had several usability problems, including UX writing problems. Since every tenant would be maintained by its own team, this interface had to work without our help.

The criterion was low development cost with high impact for the user, which set the order:

1. UX writing first: an audit of the terminology across the admin panel.
2. Interface adjustments next: moving sections to improve the information architecture, and creating new components for admin users. One example: process dates and the stage schedule now live in a single place, so the system can update the process status automatically.

Across admin and citizen, nine flows were redesigned.

The national tenant, Brasil Participativo, had to follow the gov.br visual identity so that it would be trustworthy and behave like other government products. That meant adopting the gov.br design system and bringing it into the tenant's code.

I studied how to import it through the Digital Government Standard manual (opens in a new tab) and we met the minimum requirements for color tokens, header and footer. The remaining requirements were not implemented: Decidim is a monolith and does not allow those changes easily, and rewriting it in such a short time would have been too costly.

The SaaS design system still includes the gov.br color tokens, header and footer, assets, components and layouts, so the work is ready for when the code allows more.

The platform launches in October 2026. Beta and usability tests with real users have not been run yet: we are at the stage of writing the test script, so there are no results to report. The design system and the screens are ready to be tested.

Every decision here traded impact against cost and time. Starting with the changes that were cheapest to build and helped the most users is what made an MVP possible in the time available, and it kept the design system ready for the parts we had to leave for later.