Australian Death Notification Service

The Brief

The Australian Death Notification Service (ADNS) is a recently created national program aimed at helping individuals deal with losing someone close to them. It does this through providing a single online service to notify multiple organisations that someone has died, allowing their accounts to be closed or transferred. This greatly reduces time and effort otherwise spent individually contacting each organisation, which is especially invaluable during such distressing times.

The ADNS needed a clear and intuitive UI, catering for all demographics and notably considerate for the high stress situation its users would be in. It was also essential that all data collected was traceable and transparent in regards to who would have access.

My role: UX design project lead, onboarding after the initial MVP was launched.

Key Design Challenges

• Although delivered by the NSW government, the ADNS is a national service and needed to form its own brand identity, moving away from its original NSW design patterns.

• The new brand identity needed to be soft and welcoming, being mindful of the breadth of different religions, cultures and ages of its users.

• Users were often confused with the intent of the service and how to use it, commonly thinking it was were they obtained a death certificate.

• Initially created with only a few organisational participants, as the number of organisations grew it became clear the existing design patterns were not scalable to adequately accomodate this.

• The application of best practices to the online form itself, to increase efficiency and reduce cognitive load as much as possible for users struggling with their recent loss.

• Ensuring accessibility guidelines were met to the highest standard.

The Solution

After a number of ideation sessions, two distinct prototypes were developed to take into usability testing, which consistent primarily of virtual A/B testing sessions with participant from across the country. Once the results were analysed, a final design solution was created, and I worked closely with the development team for delivery.

Key improvements were made to the homepage, with the creation of an infographic ‘how to’ guide, improved clarification around the nature of the service as well as the required documentation needed to proceed. After an extensive search to find a new banner image that was welcoming and ‘Australian’ without any specific references to culture, age or death, the eucalyptus branches were selected. This were so successful that it not only became the cornerstone of the new ADNS identity, but also spearheaded a rebrand of the entire Births, Deaths and Marriages department.

Automation logic was embedded into the form components, so that users only saw the fields necessary for them to complete, simplifying the pages and reducing cognitive load. This was paired with a brand new format to show participating organisations, utilising logos for quick recognition and filter/search functionality to accomodate large scale data.

Updated feedback mechanisms allowed users to verify the data that they were providing to organisations, and email receipts provided accessible records and next steps.