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Designing a digital service for changing workplaces with WorkSafe Victoria

  • Interaction Design
  • Digital Services
  • User Experience
  • Information Architecture

The world of work is changing at an unprecedented rate. The impact of this change on Victorian workers is immense, and as the state’s workplace safety regulator, WorkSafe’s responsibility to ensure their safety has never been more challenging. The concept of safety is also shifting with an increased focus on prevention and mental health and wellbeing.

To tackle this, WorkSafe has initiated a major transformation agenda. We won the work to set a vision for the future of their digital service and to redesign and re-platform the WorkSafe website.

Visit the new website.

Approach

The previous digital experience was fragmented for users, with inconsistent and manual processes making it difficult to complete critical tasks. It was also fragmented for WorkSafe’s teams, increasing wastage and making it difficult to innovate—a critical capability for the organisation in a changing world.

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We defined a vision for the future of WorkSafe’s digital presence using stakeholder interviews, ethnographic research, journey mapping and rapid prototyping. We explored multiple possible concepts through the lens of feasibility, desirability and viability.

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It was clear that this was about more than a website—it was about innovation readiness. WorkSafe needed a solution that supported them to adapt to new challenges and possibilities with ease, and also needed the processes that supported people from across their organisation to deliver it. It needed to be simple, practical and adaptable.

We assembled a multidisciplinary team of service designers, interaction designers, technologists, producers and WorkSafe team members, working with an agile methodology.

We led the design and delivery of the new website platform, leveraging a “headless” content management system supporting multiple client web applications and a modular front-end component library. This elegant technical architecture is unprecedented for a public sector website. By using and extending open-source tooling, we were able to deliver benefits for all of government, opening up channels for collaboration between agencies and departments.

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To serve WorkSafe’s diverse range of customers—experts, novices, health and safety practitioners, business owners and workers, we created a content personalisation strategy and a system of design components that can be recomposed at will for different customer segments. The site will intelligently reduce the number of steps required to answer a visitor's question.

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The new WorkSafe website launched in July 2018. It’s a high profile expression of WorkSafe’s transformation from a traditional regulator to a community partner, offering active advice and training through a seamless and delightful experience.

Alongside the website, we authored and road-tested the tools and documentation that WorkSafe need to support and extend their platform.

Impact

The impact of this on the lives of Victorians will be felt over the next few years. It will help injured Victorians return to work faster, which in turn helps contribute to their recovery, and reduce the stress and anxiety of the claims process.

It will guide Victorian businesses to creating safer workspaces for their employees’ health and wellbeing. And it will enable WorkSafe to deliver an adaptive service for a changing world.