South Australian Government

Embedded with the South Australian Government through Atomix across the Department of Premier and Cabinet, SA Health, the Electoral Commission SA, and the Department of Energy and Mining. I worked as a UX and service designer across five citizen-facing digital products and one internal service mapping engagement.

These were public services with real compliance and legal weight, shipped under live COVID-19 conditions. Regulations changed mid-project. Stakeholders carried institutional constraints that weren’t always visible up front. The work needed to move fast without sacrificing rigour, and the products had to be usable by people in stressful circumstances who couldn’t afford to get stuck.

Across the engagements, the team followed the same process: research and service design first, then design, then testing, before anything was built. Where products were already live, we validated against both business and user requirements before signing off. Research methods varied by project — diary studies for sustained behavioural insight, moderated testing for flow validation — but every product passed through real users before it shipped.

Led UX design for a COVID-19 compliance app that verified home quarantine adherence through location tracking and facial recognition check-ins. SA Health regulations were the source material, and my job was translating those into flows that people in stressful circumstances could follow without needing support.

For research we ran diary studies with people in or recently out of quarantine to understand how the app fit into the wider quarantine experience. I synthesised the diary entries into themes that fed into design decisions and into subsequent moderated testing. I owned the full end-to-end flow design and worked closely with the dev team throughout build, making sure what shipped matched the designed intent and flagging where technical constraints required design decisions to be revisited.

Designed the end-to-end flow for COVID-19 border exemption applications and status tracking. The dashboard had to handle multiple states (pending, approved, declined) across a wide range of exemption categories, each with different eligibility rules.

Stakeholder sessions with SA Health were ongoing — border policy changed frequently, which meant exemption criteria changed too. Keeping the design aligned with current regulation while maintaining a coherent user experience required constant communication and fast iteration. Moderated testing on key flows surfaced where people misread the status indicators and where the eligibility logic needed clearer surfacing.

Designed the licence renewal flow within the new (unreleased) MySA Gov app, integrating with existing government identity infrastructure. Stakeholder engagement included working with Service SA to understand the existing manual process and map what needed to change to support a digital-first renewal pathway. Moderated testing validated the renewal flow before sign-off.

Moderated testing was the workhorse method across these projects — recording sessions, watching them back with the team, capturing key takeaways, and synthesising notes into a shared set of changes. Pairing that with diary studies on Home Quarantine gave us both the moment-to-moment usability picture and the longer-arc behavioural one, which mattered for products people had to live with for days or weeks at a time.

The team shipped multiple government digital services used by South Australians during one of the most operationally demanding periods in the state’s recent history. The work covered the full lifecycle, from research and service design through to build validation, on products with real compliance and legal weight behind them.

Working embedded in government under live COVID-19 conditions taught me how to design under genuine pressure — not just deadline pressure, but the kind where regulations change mid-project and stakeholders carry institutional constraints you can’t always see upfront.

The biggest thing I took from this work was learning how to push back effectively. Developers have instincts, stakeholders have preferences, and those don’t always align with what users actually need. I learned how to build the case with evidence from research and testing rather than design opinion, and how to hold that position when there’s pressure to move fast.