Hoop'd is our intelligent design system — a framework for building digital experiences that genuinely connect people to the places, services, and communities around them.
The gap between people and the services that exist to support them is one of the defining challenges of the digital age. Information is fragmented, navigation is complex, and the burden of finding the right support falls on people with the least resources and capacity. Hoop'd is built to close that gap.
What is Hoop'd
Hoop'd is Mortar's intelligent design system for place-based digital experiences. It provides the components, patterns, and intelligence needed to build applications that help people understand and navigate the services, spaces, and communities available to them — wherever they are and whatever they need.
Designed for individual organisations, as well as local consortia across all place-based stakeholders (public sector organisations, housing providers, local authorities, and community networks) Hoop'd takes the complexity out of building user-centred digital services. It provides a coherent, accessible foundation that teams can build on, rather than starting from scratch every time.
How Hoop'd Works
Hoop'd operates as a layered system. At the foundation are a set of accessible, well-tested UI components — the outputs of many years of delivering service design solutions. Above that sits a layer of intelligent connectivity microservices: search, filtering, mapping, recommendation, and personalisation capabilities that make the difference between a traditional directory and a genuinely useful tool.
- Component library: A comprehensive set of accessible, responsive UI components ready to deploy — reducing build time and ensuring consistency.
- Place intelligence: Map and geolocation capabilities that anchor content and services in the real-world contexts that matter to users.
- Smart search and filtering: Intelligent search that surfaces the most relevant results, not just keyword matches.
- Personalisation: Adaptive experiences that learn from user behaviour to surface the most relevant content and connections.
- Integration-ready: Built to connect to existing data sources, CRM systems, and service directories.
Key Features
- Service discovery: Help users find the services they need — filtered by location, availability, eligibility, and need.
- Community mapping: Visualise the assets, services, and opportunities available across a place — giving organisations and communities a shared picture of what exists.
- Accessible by design: Every component is built to WCAG 2.1 AA standards, ensuring your digital product works for everyone.
- Rapid deployment: Pre-built templates and patterns mean you can move from brief to live faster, without sacrificing quality.
- Analytics and insight: Understand how people are using your platform — what they are searching for, where they are dropping off, and how you can improve.
Why It Matters
Too many place-based digital solutions are built on generic platforms that were not designed with any sustainability or scalability in mind, ultimately failing to gain the trust of the communities intended to be supported. Many of these solutions are hard to navigate, inaccessible to people with lower digital confidence, and disconnected from the real-world complexity of local services and communities.
Hoop'd is different. It has been developed through years of working with people, building local capacity and infrastructure to serve local authorities, housing providers, and community organisations with digital solutions that genuinely meet user needs. The result is a system that understands the specific challenges of place-based digital work — and provides the tools to meet them.
Get in Touch
If you are building a new digital service or looking to improve an existing one, Hoop'd provides the foundation to do it right. Get in touch to find out how Hoop'd could work for your organisation.