When China announced a raft of changes to its import requirements, it affected thousands of Australian food businesses. For many, this would be their first interaction with our department.
The problem
In mid-2021, China announced new registration and product labelling requirements for imported food products. The changes would come into effect from 1 January 2022, but businesses needed to apply to be registered with China and ensure their labelling was compliant well in advance of the requirements coming into effect.
The requirements applied to a broad range of food products. For commodities like baby food, sports supplements and unroasted coffee, the requirements were entirely new and alien.
Many Australian manufacturers, processors and storage businesses handling these ‘non-prescribed goods’ had little to no previous interaction with our department. Or if they did, it was through highly manual, paper-based processes.
We now had just one week to stand up a digital service to enable them to register.
My approach
A specialist multidisciplinary team was set up with the objective of designing and deploying this digital registration service. As the strategic designer, I worked closely with research, the interaction designer, researchers, subject matter expert, developers and legal to facilitate decisions, manage risks and deliver a viable, user-centric solution.
The short timeframe meant we would not be able to integrate with existing systems, include document upload functionality or establish a solution that would allow users to save and store partially completed applications.
This meant a higher than usual risk of receiving incorrect or incomplete applications (as we couldn’t validate information entered in real-time), and of users losing unsaved information or failing to submit. I needed to identify innovative, pragmatic and user-friendly solutions to mitigate these risk.
In addition, since we knew the service would wind down after a 3-week period, I strived to maximise opportunities for re-use: of learnings and patterns so that we could deliver longer-term value and impact.
Solutions I designed and validated in testing included an interactive checklist at the beginning of the form, deliberately introducing friction to ensure users were aware that their answers would not save until submission, and that they had all the necessary info and enough time, ready to go.
To help users navigate the highly complex and unfamiliar regulatory process I designed an eligibility checker – an interactive tool that funnelled users to the correct tasks based on their answers.
As well as giving users high confidence that they were doing the right thing, this approach catered for other commodity areas who did not need to use the service – taking them to a tailored exit page, which included a pathway to the right course of action for them.
The result
The service was successfully deployed in under a week, enabling the department to collect details from affected businesses to recommend to China for registration. This meant Australian food businesses could continue exporting to China without interruption to business.
The team received a 2022 Secretary Award for Excellence in recognition of the achievement.
I also worked with our design system lead to incorporate and socialise new interaction and content patterns that we’d validated during the project, making them available for re-use across the program.
rachael quigley 