STRATEGY
STRATEGY
BRAND
Dept of Education
ROLE
Design Strategy Lead
TIMELINE
2023-2024
SERVICES
Service Design / Strategy
The Connected Experience brings together data and digital experiences to reimagine new ways for Victorian school staff and families to interact with the Department of Education.
Our approach was grounded in understanding end-to-end service journeys while aligning to organisational capabilities and constraints, ensuring every design decision responded to the administrative and compliance burden and the complexity of our fragmented technological landscape.
Schools operate in a climate of growing regulatory burden which is increasing administrative and compliance workload. Principals, teaching staff and citizens spend excessive time navigating a fragmented digital ecosystem, with multiple applications developed in silos across business units.
The Connected Experience seeks to address this by making sense of this complexity. Rather than replacing legacy systems, we aimed to reduce complexity by designing for coherence across systems and surfacing the most relevant information and tasks at the right time.
A human-centred, design thinking process was applied to chart a strategic path forward. The team began by conducting discovery research, systems mapping and service blueprinting across policy, operational and program services. This surfaced a clear picture of systemic pain points and duplicated effort.
Discovery
Reframing
Validation
Through iterative prototyping and testing, designers, architects and product leads developed future-state concepts that consolidated interactions into a role-based portal view. These prototypes illustrated how data, workflow automation and service touchpoints could be combined to reduce cognitive load and operational friction.
"Ultimately, the project demonstrated how design strategy can turn complexity into clarity – and shift a system from reactive delivery to purposeful, human-centred innovation."
The project resulted in a scalable, modular platform that reduces duplication and enhances user trust. By consolidating access to data and services into a single, intuitive experience, the project is expected to significantly reduce administrative burden across Victoria’s schools, improving staff wellbeing and increasing engagement with government systems.
It sets a new benchmark by demonstrating how design strategy can transform siloed government services into connected, human-centred ecosystems.
