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.

I designed the check-in flows in Adobe XD, then we tested in two passes. First, in-person moderated sessions against the prototype. Then a field diary study with people actually in quarantine: daily check-ins through Forms, plus video calls every two days. I ran both, mentored by a senior UX lead, and affinity mapped the results in Miro into themes I presented back to the team.

I owned the 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.

The moderated sessions told us whether people could complete a check-in. The diary study told us how it felt to live inside one, and that turned out to be the more important question.

Participants were frightened of the random check-ins. Not confused by them, frightened. Several believed that missing one meant police would arrive at the door. Nothing in the flow said that, and nothing in the policy said it either, but the app never explained what a check-in actually was or what happened if you missed it, so people filled the silence with the worst thing they could imagine. It was a finding the lab sessions could never have produced, because it only existed after days of living with the app under real stress.

The obvious fix was to stop the check-ins being random. I argued for exploring validation methods that didn’t depend on unannounced intervals, since the randomness was doing the psychological damage. Policy required it, and policy wouldn’t move.

So we changed everything around it. We rewrote the messaging to explain plainly what a check-in is and what a missed one actually means, so a slip stopped reading as a knock at the door. I softened how the app spoke to people under pressure, and specced skeleton loading for the devs so the wait never felt like something had gone wrong. I also pushed back on lower-value work the team wanted to build, including dark mode, to keep the effort on the parts that reduced stress.

Reported anxiety dropped. Honestly, not as far as I wanted. Sometimes the honest result is a partial one: policy won the randomness call, so we won the parts we could, which were tone, reassurance, and craft.

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.