The problem to solve

I led discovery to reframe the business problem, align executives on risk‑aware scope, and define a phased, evidence‑led approach that prioritised fairness, visibility, and trust.

• Reached agreement on framing the problem, business risks, guardrails, and decisions
• Led product feature ideation workshops, journey mapping, and feature prioritisation
• Prioritised feature roadmap by impact and downside risk using Kano analysis
• Tested assumptions quickly without over‑investment using AI-accelerated design

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When Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria needed to add digital proof of identity to certificate applications, trust and clarity were as important as productivity gains.

The problem to solve

• Digital application forms still relied on paper-based and in-person verification steps
• Physical steps compounded inequality for people with limited mobility, time or confidence
• Regional and vulnerable communities were disproportionately affected by paper-based verification
• Available digital verification options were controlled by financial institutions, raising trust and privacy concerns

Approach

Using service principles to design a prototype, I tested a proposed integration of a third-party verification service within the context of an existing government service:

• Planned and ran moderated usability testing with representative Victorian users
• Redesigned an end-to-end certificate application process with digital identity verification
• Tested with representative users to measure task completion, confidence and satisfaction
• Managed risks to government reputational spillover and negative sentiment

My recommendations to government

• The entire journey must feel like a government service to maintain trust
• Progress and context must be preserved when moving between systems
• Reduce unnecessary questions by reusing information already provided

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I needed to reconsider the customer experience for rewards to introduce points redemption processes for both outright purchase and ongoing repayment plans. I also needed to introduce member authentication to the flow, to enable personalisation and rewards membership functions.

The problem to solve

To design feasible and desirable personalisation, I needed to redesign the customer flow

• When was the earliest that an influential and viable personalised price could be shown?
• How to balance additional complexity of points currency with the desirability of rewards pricing?
• How to design an engaging experience that had a viable backstage process?

The work done

• Analyse competitor strengths and weaknesses with heuristic evaluation
• Synthesise customer experience principles to influence decisions
• Co-create the experience to understand the best fit within constraints
• Test the customer experience with an iterative prototype
• Monitor engagement, conversions and feedback after launch

Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

To answer the question, “why buy from Telstra?”, we needed to synthesise design principles for our rewards program so that we could evaluate our design ideas against a ‘north star’.

I used a heuristic analysis to evaluate 12 competitor rewards programs. For each key experience, noting moments of joy, integrations, touchpoints, frustrations, trust and transparency, and the ease of use including constraints of how and when rewards currencies could be used.

I synthesised the following rules of thumb from what was working, and what wasn’t.

Preparing for usability testing

After facilitating co-design sessions with key stakeholders from product, design, technology, legal, and customer service, I evaluated 4 options for flows against each of the 4 customer experience principles.

I prepared an interactive prototype of the proposed solution for message placements, progressive personalisation and authentication, rewards redemption, and discounted price.

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When redesigning a self-service portal, I needed to prioritise the highest value improvements to work within budget, but also keep a strategic end-goal in sight.

Using design principles to generate insights, I prioritised a design roadmap that fed the product backlog, worked on redesigns with an iterative design plan, and added to content and accessibility guidelines to achieve consistency.

The problem to solve

• Applicants need to resolve blockers quickly to avoid delays and lost opportunity
• Application delays were a risk to business revenue potential
• Feedback themes were usability, accessibility, mobile experience and process fit
• Enquiries needed to be sent to the right place to avoid processing delays

Approach

Working with lean and agile principles, I needed to focus my design efforts on the highest value improvements:

• Review against industry-recognised design heuristic conventions
• Collaborate with stakeholders and experts to prioritise improvements
• Order a backlog by business viability, technical feasibility and UX desirability
• Design an iterative hypothesis to address the highest priority improvements

Building the case for redevelopment

After commencing the review, it was clear configuration alone would not address enough of the issues found, and that to achieve accessibility targets, the effort would exceed the available resources.

Ordering the backlog

• Issues were prioritised by business viability, UX desirability, and build feasibility
• The highest priority issues were estimated and added to the product backlog
• Additional work orders were created for redevelopment to address the backlog
• Remaining work was added to the design roadmap and guidelines created

The following example shows how the review was applied to redesign a contact form.

Contact form redesign

Current state review

I started redesign tasks using the design review and backlog to break down the big design piece into smaller units of work. As an example, here’s a summary of the design review for the contact form.

• Guidelines needed

  • Writing style inconsistencies included use of passive language, inconsistent sentence case, inconsistent first-person references (“your”, “my”, “their”), and inconsistent proper noun capitalisation
  • Design inconsistencies included the use of components mismatched to the type of question, like pull down lists with hundreds of options, and checkbox components used when a radio control was more appropriate.

• Simplified form design

  • A single column form layout was needed to reduce the risk of omission errors
  • The number of questions needed to be reduced to fit on a single page, by conditionally hiding irrelevant questions, and removing the unnecessary information gathering
  • On-screen instruction was needed to explain what information was needed, but instructions for how to use a web interface (e.g., ‘click below’) were not needed.

• Improved accessibility

  • Pull-down option select elements were not accessible when used to show hundreds of options
  • Unanswered mandatory questions should not have had a valid answer selected by default, so that omission errors would be detected
  • Temporary placeholder text should not have been used for instructions because they disappeared. Persistent helper text was needed for error correction (e.g., to explain phone number formats).

• Mobile experience

  • Ineligible text that appeared partially off screen and text that was obscured under overlapping elements reduced form usability
  • A responsive design was needed to re-flow wide content to fit the screen, and replace fixed width tables that did not resize
  • The mobile navigation needed redesign so that navigation links were usable and not obscured off-screen
  • The mobile header needed redesign. One quarter of the mobile screen was filled with unused white space that displaced useful content.

Download design review (PDF 11.2Mb)

Future state redesign

Using Figma and a design system based on Fluent, I needed to redesign components to address the accessibility issues and improve mobile compatibility.

The design had to accommodate two states: a future state, and an operational state:

1. Future state: a strategic end-user focussed design that addressed 422 issues and achieved WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria with a contemporary design system
2. Operational state: a design iteration, collaborated with product and technical teams, based on a prioritised roadmap of 20 of 422 improvements and the legacy design system.

The redesigned contact form

• Reduced redundant form choices from 600 options to 20 options
• Responsive and mobile compatible, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility improvements
• Content consistent with writing style guidelines.

The post Prioritising a product backlog with lean UX appeared first on davehone.com.

RAPs is a service designed to address inequitable access to education.

Using co-creation to understand the end-to-end experience, we prioritised improvement opportunities based on impact and technical complexity.

The problem to solve

I needed to reach out to accessibility communities of practice, students, health care professionals and internal stakeholders to find out what was working well and where there was room to improve services for students living with a disability.

• Start with a deep understanding of students living with a disability
• Work across organisation silos and include users to co-create a future state vision
• Evaluate opportunities for improvement, using service design rules of thumb
• Shift thinking from current solutions to problem statements

Outputs

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