Me, so far

In the trial, teachers and VET trainers rate students on five capabilities: collective engagement, personal enterprise, principled action, quality thinking and self-motivated learning. Each capability breaks into parts, like adapting or being responsible, and each part is rated on what a teacher actually saw a student do.

The idea isn’t new. SACE has been shaping it for about five years, through research and a running log of decisions about what the profile should and shouldn’t be. I joined partway through, taking over from another designer, so my first job was to catch up on that history and keep what still held, rather than start the thinking again.

The ratings needed somewhere to go. The student side, a profile where a student sees what their teachers noticed, sets a direction and shares it with someone who matters, was mine to design. The teacher side already existed as a prototype, and I was asked to keep it in step.

It was a pilot, with real students and teachers ahead of it, so everything had to be testable rather than pretty pictures. I built both prototypes in working code, on phone and desktop, from the second week on. Every student in them is made up. The one you’ll see throughout is Mia, starting Stage 1 in the second semester of 2026.

I joined on 8 October and finished on 13 November. The short version is below. Each week built on the one before, and nothing waited for a big reveal.

Before drawing a single screen, I needed to know what the whole thing was. I read five years of program history and met the program team one to one, each time to hear their view rather than pitch mine. Then I built two service blueprints from scratch, one for students and one for teachers, across a full school year.

The blueprints set a few rules that later shaped the product. A lane only holds what that person can actually see, so if a student can’t see something, like a teacher rating them, it goes behind the scenes. An empty cell says ‘Nothing to see yet’ instead of being filled to look busy. And plain words throughout, so the blueprint can be read by a principal as easily as a developer.

The trial’s biggest risk was never technical. It was a 16-year-old opening an app and feeling measured. The question I kept the whole design to was simple: show how a student is good, not how good a student is.

That one sentence ruled a lot out. No progress bars, no scores, no ticks, no rankings and no comparison with other students, anywhere. Instead, each part is described as something the student did, who saw it replaces how much, and the student’s own words sit beside the teacher’s without ever changing a rating.

A capabilities profile has no obvious shape, so I designed three ways to picture growth and built all three. Open Sky is a night sky where each part a teacher saw is a star. Keepsakes is a board of hand-cut pieces taped around the student’s portrait. Your moments is a string of beads, hung in the semester each part first showed up.

The rule that made three ideas affordable: they share every flow. Signing in, results day, notes, goals, sharing and Explore are the same steps with the same words in all three. Only the picture, the tab names and where each flow ends change, and those live in one place in the code. That’s what lets a research session compare the ideas fairly, and what let one designer build all three.

Teenagers can spot an adult trying to look young from a mile off, so the look had to come from things they already make and keep: riso prints, hand-cut paper, clear tape, ink drawings, a bit of holographic foil on something special. I called the system Collected.

It’s built on SACE’s own design system underneath, with the same base colours, spacing and focus styles, so it belongs to the family. Then it adds rules for how much ink goes where: light on screens you read, more on the student’s own pages, most on results day. Never behind text, never on a button, never on anything that could read as a rank.

Every flow runs end to end on phone and desktop, from the first button to its end state back at home, with no dead ends. Here are five of them, each in its own words.

The teacher tool is where the data comes in, so it has to be fast, calm and hard to get wrong. Early on, I gave it a design system foundation with shared tokens and components, and made the dashboard about one thing: the class to assess next.

The bigger change was how rating works. Teachers now rate one student at a time, one part of a capability per screen, with the capability’s meaning beside them, a comment if they want one, keyboard shortcuts for every option, and a summary before moving to the next student. I kept whole-class rating off any single screen on purpose: a grid of 28 names invites rating the class rather than the person.

Later I proposed a name for it, Capabilities Online, to sit beside Schools Online and Students Online, so the tool wouldn’t be confused with the program. Its mark is the five capability colours in a ring.

Students will open this on school laptops and their own phones, some with a screen reader, so both prototypes are built to WCAG 2.2 AA and the South Australian Government’s accessibility toolkit, and checked against both at phone and desktop widths.

In week five I audited both prototypes properly: an automated crawl of every screen at both widths, scripted keyboard focus tests, and reading the accessibility tree the way a screen reader would. Then I fixed what it found in both codebases. A few of the findings were the kind no checklist catches.

The three ideas were built to be tested with students before anyone picked one. I wrote the research plans for two rounds, and built the tools to run them into the prototype itself: a student screen that only ever shows the student their task, a separate notes window for the facilitator with the script, and a record of taps and pauses, never typing.

Testing hadn’t started by the time I finished, so there are no findings here. What I handed over is the plan, the run sheets and a prototype ready for the first session.

Five weeks is a short time to own something this size, so I planned the ending from the start. Both prototypes have a showcase page that opens each key moment with Mia’s made-up profile set up for it, so the program team can show the work without me in the room.

The handover pack covers the decisions and why each was made, with dates and who set them, a guide to each codebase, both design systems, the service blueprints and the research plans. ‘Me, so far’ and ‘Capabilities Online’ are working names I proposed, not names students or teachers know yet. Whatever the trial decides to keep, it starts from something that works.