Good design in government isn’t about making things pretty—it’s about making policy usable, workflows clear, and trust visible in every click.

Overview

The Government Provider Management System (GPMS) is a federal digital portal designed to support Aged care providers (Residential aged care, in-home support, or respite care) in fulfilling their responsibilities under national reforms. It facilitates critical tasks such as compliance submissions, funding interactions, and information access across a complex regulatory landscape.

Initially conceived as a minimally viable product, GPMS had become fragmented, compliance-heavy, and frustrating to use, especially for small providers or those without technical staff. Our goal was to lead a service transformation that mirrors the ambition behind PDMS: a whole-of-government platform that is scalable, accessible, and centered on usability.

My Role

As EL1 Lead Product Designer, I was embedded in a cross-functional team where I led:

• Discovery workshops and stakeholder mapping across departments

• Co-design and usability testing with providers (metro: Parramatta, regional: Wagga Wagga , and remote: Nhulunbuy)

• Wireframing and prototyping high-value workflows

• Building and governing a design system aligned with government accessibility (DTA’s DXP) and branding standards

• Supporting delivery teams through sprint-based design delivery and QA

The Challenges

Like many large-scale government platforms, GPMS was supporting a wide spectrum of users: from daily compliance officers to part-time administrators. Key issues included:

• Overwhelming navigation and inconsistent UI patterns

• Confusion around submissions, approvals, and compliance deadlines

• Poor accessibility compliance (missing ARIA labels, no keyboard flow)

• Limited guidance for first-time or infrequent users

• High volumes of calls to support teams with “How do I…?” questions

Government was also pushing for digital transformation under significant legislative pressure.

Technical and Security Constraints:

From a technical standpoint, the platform was underpinned by Salesforce for workflow and data storage. This meant we had to design within the framework of Lightning components, permission hierarchies, and record types, while still delivering a clean, unified experience. We have to work closely with Salesforce architects to map UI elements to underlying objects, ensuring metadata-driven flexibility while maintaining usability.

Data security was a top priority. The system operated at the PROTECTED classification level, so we needed to balance user-friendly design with strict authentication, session management, and audit trail compliance. We needed interactions to work seamlessly with secure MFA flows and ensured patterns like autosave and submission feedback respected both security and performance constraints.

Discovery & Research

We applied human-centered design and co-design methods across several phases:

• 30+ user interviews across city, regional, and remote providers

• Journey mapping with policy, audit, and IT teams

• Service blueprints to trace process and pain points

• Persona development to reflect the real diversity of the user base (tech-savvy admin officers vs. low-digital-literacy managers)

This process revealed friction not only in UI but also in workflow logic and system feedback loops.

Design Strategy

We adopted a modular, component-driven approach governed by a Figma-based design system.

Key design pillars:

1. Trust & Transparency: Real-time submission confirmations, version tracking, and easy-to-read status banners

2. Guided Flows: Chunked task flows and embedded help for novice users

3. Cross-agency Consistency: Reusable UI patterns that mirrored other gov platforms, easing onboarding

Each pattern was WCAG 2.1 AA tested and accessibility-checked using screen readers and contrast tools. We also prioritized mobile responsiveness to enable field-based interactions.

The approach aligns with the broader direction of digital transformation across government platforms:

• Whole-of-Gov Thinking: We designed GPMS to serve diverse provider cohorts with shared infrastructure.

• Scalable UX Patterns: A consistent design system enables faster rollout and onboarding across government teams.

• Service Design, Not Just UI: We addressed not just screens but workflow clarity, cross-agency governance, and adoption behavior.

• Accessibility by Default: WCAG was built in from the outset, not added later.

• Team Collaboration: I worked daily with policy leads, developers, change managers, and testers in an agile product team structure

Outcomes

The PoC user-testing and validation had great outcomes:

• Support inquiries dropped by 40% in the first quarter

• Submission error rates decreased by 35%

• WCAG compliance verified by third-party audit (0 critical defects)

• Time to complete key workflows reduced by up to 50%

• NPS moved from 1.7 to 4.5 within two months post-launch

Stakeholders, who were once skeptical, began inviting design input proactively, we saw the cultural shift.

Reflection

Designing GPMS confirmed that real transformation requires coordinated service design, not just cosmetic fixes. The biggest breakthroughs came when we stopped thinking like product teams and started designing for cross-agency policy delivery.

This experience makes me confident in my ability to lead, not just design, in a system, where the intersection of policy, technology, and user behavior is both complex and high impact.