In 2021, the Department of Agriculture began a $222M program of work to slash red tape, and improve export regulation and service delivery for exporters. At the time, many of its processes were still paper-based.
The problem
Exporting agricultural goods from Australia can a confusing and frustrating experience. It can also be time-consuming and costly.
Exporters must navigate multiple government agencies – at state and federal level – and multiple disconnected systems. This includes many paper-based interactions.
The department aims to tackle the problem by modernising its agricultural export systems. Taking Farmers to Market is a 3-5 year trade reform program, to provide a single digital service for transactions between exporters and government.
My approach
Within this program of work, I led the end-to-end ‘guidance and support’ strategic initiative – a content strategy role that also leaned heavily on my delivery management and service design skills.
We had 10 weeks to define and deliver a guidance and support MVP for the public beta release of the service. This included collaborating with and influencing existing product teams to deliver a seamless user experience, rather than the series of fragmented microservices they were working towards.
By surfacing key insights around our users’ needs, pain points and behaviours and defining the concepts of ‘guidance’ and ‘support’, I enabled more meaningful and productive conversations across the business and helped set benchmarks for what a shared vision of ‘good’ could look like.
Working closely with the program’s strategic service designer, I then led the team through rapid prototyping, concept testing and iteration, which informed delivery of:
- an MVP homepage for the export service, supporting simple, intuitive experiences across complex role-based interactions
- a detailed backlog of prioritised opportunitiessupported by a end-to-end prototype to help PMs and service designers across the program align towards a single vision
- guidelines and patterns to empower delivery teams in their content and interaction design.
The result
The department was able to deliver a unified ‘single service’ experience for users, that:
- suits all commodities
- accommodates for different role-based experiences across the export supply chain
- is simple, easy and intuitive for people to use
- has a clear value proposition.
This laid the foundation for a robust and scalable service that transforms the customer experience rather than simply digitising it.
The digital export service was a 2022 Good Design Award winner.
rachael quigley 