User Research
This is easily one of the most rewarding and meaningful projects of my career. Achieve Australia is a major disability services provider, and as someone with personal experience working on the ground as a Support Worker, I was incredibly proud to lead the UX research and service design for their website redesign and accommodation services.
When you are designing for the disability sector, accessibility is not a checklist or an afterthought, it is the entire foundation of the product. My goal was to create a digital experience that was truly inclusive, seamless, and dignified for users with diverse needs.
The most critical part of this project was the user research, which required us to completely rethink how standard UX interviews are conducted. We were designing for individuals with non-verbal and high-physical disabilities, which meant traditional testing methods would not work. To build an accurate picture of the user experience, we had to innovate.
We conducted adaptive user interviews, learning to interpret non-verbal cues, comfort levels, and physical interactions with technology. To fill the gaps, we extended our research to the users’ support networks, conducting deep-dive interviews and card-sorting activities with caregivers, family members, and support workers who navigate these systems daily.
Taking those raw, empathetic insights from the field, I led the end-to-end UX architecture using Sketch and InVision. I mapped out complex service design blueprints, created detailed user personas, and constructed intuitive user journeys and screen flows specifically tailored to accommodation services.
We took a fragmented, overwhelming process and distilled it into a clear, accessible digital pathway, ensuring that anyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities, could find the support they need. This project is a testament to what happens when you combine genuine ground-level empathy with rigorous UX design principles to create a product that leaves no one behind.
The new digital architecture and revamped internal service design processes yielded immediate, measurable results:
Streamlined Digital Intake: Distilling the fragmented application process reduced website drop-off rates and significantly accelerated the time from initial inquiry to completed data submission.
Optimized Roommate Pairing: By capturing deeper, more nuanced lifestyle and compatibility data upfront, we engineered a major uptick in successful disability housing placements.
Operational Transformation: The insights from this project completely shifted how the organization handles its internal matching processes, replacing manual guesswork with a data-driven, empathy-led service blueprint.
