Digital Product Lead | Whole-of-Government Topic-Based Web Experience

Too many government websites were forcing customers to understand the inner workings of bureaucracy just to find the information they needed. Navigating multiple agency sites, understanding jurisdictional boundaries, and locating the right service was placing an unreasonable burden on the very people these services existed to support.

The goal was to design a radically simpler alternative a customer-tested, topic-based digital experience that allowed people to find information and access services around the clock, without needing to know which agency was responsible for what. The guiding principles were straightforward: simple to use, easy to find, personalised, and guided.

I led a multidisciplinary team of content writers, digital strategists, publishers, front-end developers, and web designers working in an agile, customer-centred, test-and-learn environment. The result was a unified digital product delivered through a decentralised publishing model, built on Squiz and indexed to a shared content platform, bringing together services from more than five government agencies including Births Deaths and Marriages, Justice of the Peace, Corrections, Police, and Fair Trading.

Customer fulfilment was integral to the design not just information delivery. The Family History research service, for example, allowed customers to search for family records, purchase birth, death, and marriage certificates, and receive them immediately closing the loop between information and transaction in a single, seamless experience.

The platform continues to be used and built upon today a testament to the durability of customer-centred design when applied with rigour and genuine intent.

This project demonstrated what becomes possible when government stops organising digital services around its own structure and starts organising them around the questions customers are actually asking.