NSW Department of Education
Led the strategic initiative for the NSW Department of Education's Assisted School Travel Program, addressing critical system inefficiencies that jeopardised student safety, resulting in streamlined operations and vastly improved child protection outcomes.
Services
User Research and Documentation
Usability Testing
Workshop Facilitation
Wireframing
Prototyping
Deliverables
Personas
Experience maps
Fully annotated, functional prototype wireframes
Outcomes
The need to navigate multiple screens, access other systems, or consult paperwork for key information was eliminated.
Common tasks were prioritised in the new design, significantly improving efficiency, in one case from to 2.5 minutes down to just 7 seconds.
Child protection was made simpler, with fewer incidents reported following the introduction of the new system.
A key program at the NSW Department of Education, the Assisted School Travel Program (ASTP), which provides transport for students with disabilities, faced significant challenges. Our initial discovery, through reviewing documentation and engaging stakeholders, revealed that outdated and inefficient systems were jeopardising operations and student safety.
Staff struggled with fragmented information across multiple systems and relied on manual workarounds. This inefficiency not only wasted time and resources but, critically, increased the risk of harm to vulnerable students. Modernising these systems was essential to streamline operations, consolidate key functions, and ensure child protection was prioritised.
To validate our findings, I created personas and experience maps representing key ASTP users. These artifacts helped us understand how users interacted with the existing systems, identifying pain points, bottlenecks, and unnecessary steps.
Example ASTP staff persona
End-to-end experience map for the application process
Based on my analysis of the current situation and the daily routines of ASTP staff, I identified two essential design principles:
Accessibility: The new system should provide immediate and effortless access to crucial information. Staff should be able to quickly locate relevant data without navigating complex menus or searching through multiple screens.
Efficiency: Workflows should be tailored to the most common tasks performed by ASTP staff. By streamlining these processes, we can significantly reduce the time and effort required to complete routine tasks, allowing staff to focus on more complex or value-added activities.
These two principles formed the foundation for the subsequent design and development phases, ensuring that the new system would meet the specific needs and challenges of ASTP staff.
I ran a co-design workshop with representatives of the ASTP and the development team responsible for developing the new system. This session had the dual purpose of validating the personas and journeys, and highlighting key pieces of information that needed to be included in the new design and how they related to each other.
I then developed a series of concept wireframes to illustrate how the new system would work for the most common tasks (as detailed in the experience maps), focused primarily on presenting the right information for each task at the right time. These were developed on-site at the Department of Education in regular consultation with the team to confirm we were moving in the right direction, and correcting when we weren’t.
Usability testing
Finally, the concept wireframes were tested with the key stakeholders.
I developed an interactive prototype and ran usability testing sessions with the staff at the ASTP who were asked to perform certain tasks using the prototype. The feedback from these sessions was then used to update and produce the final deliverable of the project, a full set of annotated wireframes that were handed over to the development team.
Applications dashboard
Easy access to priority information
Dashboards were implemented across key areas, providing ASTP staff with a centralised view of priority information. This eliminated the need to navigate multiple screens, access other systems, or consult paperwork.
Efficiency increases
The new design prioritised common tasks, significantly improving efficiency. For instance, locating a child's scheduled pickup or drop-off location, which previously required up to 2.5 minutes and involved multiple screens, can now be accomplished in just 7 seconds.
Improved child protection
The ability to react more quickly to common situations and find important information immediately reduced the risk of children being put in or left in dangerous situations, resulting in fewer incidents once the new system was put in place.
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