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Lifeline building

The suicide rate of young Australians is at a 10-year high. Crisis support services are failing to keep up with demand, and the constant change in ways Australians are interacting with information and services.

  • Service Design
  • Strategy
  • Co-design

Lifeline finds itself in the same boat as many other support services, with a service model based primarily on phone-based support. With the widespread use of smartphones and advantages with privacy and access, there’s a case for optimising and scaling crisis support services to make use of mobility and digital smarts.

Design research artefacts

Participatory design research activities were carried out with help seekers and crisis support workers.

Lifeline design team discussing design research insights
Lifeline design team working on design research synthesis
Dr. Sally Bradford discussing project research with the design team

The transdisciplinary design team included Lifeline's clinical psychologist, Dr. Sally Bradford.

Approach

Help seekers are highly vulnerable people who have wide-reaching lived experience that include grief, financial hardship, domestic violence, homelessness, mental health, and drug and alcohol abuse. As a first step to working in-situ with help seekers, we received ethics approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) to conduct our work in a safe and ethical way.

Through participatory design methods, we simulated crises in a safe and controlled way to prototype a range of conversation flows via text messaging, as a means to ideate, test and learn. Through this research, we developed new service opportunities and identified where attention was required. Some critical challenges at play included the need to facilitate trust on the support seeker side, and the opportunity for crisis supporters to leverage technology to be able to read emotion in text-based messages.

Service simulation for Lifeline service design

Controlled testing sessions saw us independently running research sessions in close collaboration with Lifeline's crisis support workers.

Speculative design concepts were developed to explore the role of emerging technology (like AI and chatbots) specifically around mediating and triaging text-based crisis inquiries.

The big opportunity for Lifeline lies in the (ethical) use of big data to better understand the needs of people accessing crisis support services, and learn from it —ultimately allowing their people to make more informed, life-saving decisions.

Lifeline crisis support worker during support service simulation

Impact

Lifeline will take a text-based crisis support service to market in 2018; offering safer, more discreet access for people during times of crisis.

The Lifeline Text service was launched in August 2018.