Department of Human Services (DHS) is responsible for delivering a number of services, including welfare payments, across the nation’s population. With such a high number of users it was crucial that DHS’s digital platform was simple for customers to use and ensured they could easily communicate with the government.

As Australia’s population continues to grow, DHS made it a priority for their systems to reflect the diversity of the population that uses it. This included making the site friendly enough that those with low reading levels, low computer literacy or a range of impairments would be able to use it.

The aim of the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) is to provide a seamless experience for everyone using the service. The transformation needed to cover face-to-face, phone and digital channels.

With the number of people using the service expected to grow in the future it was important that DHS had a thorough understanding of the needs of their users.

To help DHS understand their users and what they mainly use their services for, Pragma undertook a two-phase review of DHS’s website. We delved deep into the user journey to identify what exactly the customer wanted and needed at all different points in their claim experience.

Our user research experts developed a framework that aided DHS in understanding their user at each phase of their journey: from the very first decision making step all the way until the last.

At the start of this process DHS created hypotheses around their channels, contents and user experience. The assumptions they developed guided our team when interviewing users and creating usability tests later on.

At the completion of the user research our consultants advised DHS on the best methods to synthesise, analyse and recommend experience design to meet their objective of improving customer’s online experience.

Taking on our recommendations has meant that the content on the DHS site has improved vastly. Users now have a clear understanding of what is required to begin and complete and online claim.

Improved user experience leads to increases in customer satisfaction.

DHS has seen a measurable increase in customer satisfaction when navigating and successfully completing online claims on their site.

The readability score has improved as well as the WCAG compliance, meaning that their site now caters better for CALD, vulnerable and impaired users.