Bridging the gap between policy, technology, and the lived experiences of those who rely on essential services.
Client
Telstra Health
Role
Experience Manager
Services
Research & Insights
Service Design
Responsibility
Manage and plan research approach for providing actionable viable solutions
In the aged and disability care sector, I led an end-to-end service design initiative during a period of significant transformation, driven by evolving policy, technology, disruption and user underserved needs.
In the aged and disability care sector, I led an end-to-end service design initiative during a period of significant transformation, driven by evolving policy, technology, disruption and user underserved needs.
My role involved shaping the research strategy to capture both qualitative and quantitative insights across all levels of the service ecosystem. This included mapping the current lived experiences of individuals receiving and delivering care, identifying unmet needs, and uncovering structural pain points that spanned digital, operational, and policy layers.
Using these insights, I facilitated co-design with stakeholders to envision future-state services that balanced human needs with organisational capability. From early concept prototyping to validating adoption and supporting implementation, I worked across product, clinical, operational, and compliance teams to deliver clear service models, experience flows, and actionable roadmaps that aligned with business, policy, and user goals.
This work not only improved care outcomes but also demonstrated how systems thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and human-centred methods can drive meaningful change at scale.
Long-Term Strategy & Shaping The Vision
I led and facilitated workshops across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Policy teams to align on goals and uncover critical user and business needs.
Strategy Workshops
Led a series of foundational design workshops to align on aspirations, challenges, guiding principles, and focus areas. These sessions framed the vision for the work ahead by identifying design levers and enablers—clarifying what success looked like for the organisation and its users.
Collaboratively mapped activities and touchpoints needed to move from intention to delivery across teams.
Understanding Lived Experiences
Worked with subject matter experts to uncover the real-world experiences of people navigating the healthcare system. Mapped barriers, pain points, and emotional journeys using storyboards and narrative mapping techniques to build empathy and context.
This allowed teams to ground innovation in reality, ensuring that future-state experiences addressed systemic issues—not just interface symptoms.
Solution Hypothesis
Facilitated interactive workshops where cross-functional teams acted out early service concepts, simulating how ideas would play out in real scenarios.
This method helped expose delivery risks, validate assumptions, and spark refinement before investing in detailed design. The outputs became documented service concepts that were used to prototype and test in the market, giving the business a clearer sense of feasibility and user fit.
Reconciling the Ideal vs the Real
Investigating the NDIS Journey
To deepen our understanding of the systemic barriers facing care recipients, I conducted targeted desktop research to explore how individuals with disabilities access support through the NDIS. This involved analysing: Official NDIS resources, application flows, and eligibility documentation First-person accounts shared in public forums, social media, and community blogs Broader commentary from advocacy organisations, media outlets, and inquiries The intent was to compare the “on-paper” experience presented by the NDIS with the frustrations, confusion, and delays voiced by real participants navigating the system. This contrast allowed us to ground our service concepts in the realities of approval processes, funding uncertainty, and language complexity, rather than designing solely around theoretical policy pathways. It also helped shape communication flows, support touchpoints, and digital onboarding steps that better aligned with user capability and expectations.Activity Summary
Approach to Gaining Insights
To deeply understand the challenges and needs within aged and disability care, we conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews with a diverse range of participants, including:
Care recipients: Individuals with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and elderly individuals requiring support at home.
Care providers: Support workers, nurses, general practitioners, occupational therapists, and respite coordinators.
Each session involved:
Contextual home visits
Observing participants in their living environments to understand daily routines, challenges, and workarounds.
Semi-structured interviews
Gathering qualitative insights through open-ended questions.
Raw data analysis
Examining tools and technologies participants use to manage their care.
Thematic synthesis
Identifying common patterns and divergences across participant experiences.
Physical Artifacts for Participant Collaboration
To engage participants effectively and capture detailed insights, I utilized physical artifacts that facilitated interaction and collaboration. These included:
Health Devices
A tool to explore participants' openness to innovative health technologies and their potential use cases. This allowed participants to visualize and articulate their preferences and hesitations about adopting new technology.
About My Home
A worksheet designed to capture participants’ emotional and practical connections to their living spaces, including frustrations and ideal changes. This helped uncover deeper sentiments about their homes.
Health and Help
A structured form capturing participants' healthcare routines, required assistance, and expectations from carers. This revealed critical insights into daily struggles and support needs.
A Day in the Life
A timeline exercise where participants detailed their daily schedules, highlighting services used, activities, and involved individuals. This provided a clear picture of their routines and opportunities for service optimization.
Drawing My Home
A home-mapping activity where participants sketched their living spaces and annotated areas of comfort, challenge, and interaction with carers illuminating the spatial dynamics of their environments and their impact on daily routines.
Eco-System Design
This ecosystem map is one of several service modelling artefacts developed to visualise how people navigate complex health and care services.
It draws directly from user research and stakeholder insights to reveal critical handoffs, service overlaps, and systemic gaps across the broader care journey.
By mapping interactions between patients, carers, providers, and support services, we surfaced the operational and emotional friction points that often go unseen. These insights informed both future-state experience models and cross-functional decisions around service design, product focus, and policy alignment.
Quantitative Validation
To complement our rich qualitative data, the team and I recognised the value of quantifying how widespread certain challenges were, particularly around service navigation, breakdown points, and perceived system clarity.
Service Navigation Confidence & Breakdown Survey
Goal:To quantify how confident people are navigating healthcare and support services, where they experience drop-offs or delays, and how these correlate with specific service types or life stages.What it Measured:
Outcomes & Impact
The data helped to identify: Quantify friction points across the ecosystem map to support prioritisation Cluster insights by user type and support need to inform service differentiation Strengthen stakeholder engagement by providing statistical evidence alongside personal narratives Support investment decisions around digital tools, triage models, and staff capability building This survey was designed to scale insight gathering across a broader segment and bring evidence-backed clarity to design decisions—ensuring we weren’t just solving for the loudest voice, but for the most common and critical needs.
Prototype and testing service concepts
Yes, these are my designs.
Early Concept Validation
Used to explore early ideas with real users and stakeholders through lightweight, human-centred experiments helped co-design future-state experiences, identify unmet needs, and test desirability before committing to detailed design or build.
High-Fidelity MVP Testing
Built to simulate real-world interaction across digital and organisational layers.
These higher fidelity prototypes were used to test functionality, language, flows, and service viability—providing clear data to inform platform, engineering, and operational decisions.
Validating Adoption & Alignment
Combined insights from both lo-fi and hi-fi testing to measure potential for adoption—balancing customer needs, brand context, operational capability, and commercial viability.
⸺ Qualitative Research
Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy.
⸺ Sketch Visualization
Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment everyday routines.
⸺ Engineering Strategy
Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy.
⸺ Rapid Prototyping
Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment everyday routines.
⸺ CMF Specification
Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy.
⸺ Product Packaging
Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment everyday routines.
Product Delivery & Impact
At the conclusion of this engagement, our cross-functional work culminated in the delivery of an MVP product for care matching—a streamlined platform designed specifically for carers and care coordinators to reduce mismatch and improve continuity of care.
The Problem We Solved
Through both qualitative and quantitative insights, we identified that care recipients were frequently let down by misaligned carer placements—with issues stemming from: Skills or language barriers Cultural or emotional mismatches Inconsistent scheduling or last-minute cancellations Limited visibility into carer capability and preferences This resulted in frustrated recipients, missed appointments, and increased burden on coordination staff.
What I Delivered
I co-designed, prototyped, and launched a minimum viable product that directly addressed these pain points by: Introducing smart matching algorithms that paired care recipients with workers based on skills, language, cultural background, gender preferences, and availability. Embedding preference capture tools into onboarding workflows to personalise the experience from the start. Providing coordinators with a real-time dashboard to monitor satisfaction, reduce reassignments, and flag at-risk placements early. Designing intuitive flows for carers to update skills and availability, creating a continuously improving system over time.
My Delivery Method
I took a phased, lean delivery approach: Lo-fi concept testing with carers and coordinators to refine value propositions and avoid feature bloat Hi-fi MVP testing to simulate real-world scenarios across devices and coordination tools Agile delivery cycles in collaboration with the engineering team to scope for feasibility, value, and scalability Ongoing feedback integration into backlog prioritisation and roadmap planning This approach allowed the team and I to test fast, learn quickly, and release a focused solution that could evolve over time without overwhelming the operational environment.
Impact
Overtime, Telstra Health saw: Significant reduction in carer–recipient mismatches and service cancellations during pilot rollout Increased satisfaction reported by both care recipients and staff Improved scheduling efficiency and reduced manual rework for care coordinators Clear value signals that supported broader investment in digital coordination infrastructure