What do you need to do when someone close to you dies? What support can you get if you become seriously ill? What are all the things you need to do if you're affected by drought?
Across many life events, understanding what you need to do, what support you can access, and what your options are is complicated - but it doesn't need to be. The Next Steps team are doing the hard work to make navigating complex life events simpler. We're taking a whole-of-government approach to building a series of new digital services that help people navigate complex life events.
What people are saying
Across many research projects - our own, and the extensive life events research conducted by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) - people are telling government that they're having trouble:
- finding the right information at the right time
- understanding what they're entitled to from government
- understanding what they're required to do
- with inconsistent and inaccessible content
- when there's no central, authoritative source of information
- finding clear pathways to reach an outcome
The Next Steps team want to help fix this by providing services that inform people of all their options, entitlements, and obligations during complex life events.
But what's a âcomplex life event'?
By this we mean things that happen in people's lives that:
- cause people to seek advice or information
- involve multiple steps or interactions with government
Some examples include:
- after someone close to you dies
- when you retire
- if you are diagnosed with a serious illness
The first iteration of our site involves navigators in eight areas: end of life, starting and growing a family, retiring, serious illness and injury, careers, schooling, natural disasters and living in NSW.
These are just the beginning - we have several more in the backlog and expect these to grow and change with research.
Connecting the dots
We know that finding information about government services can be hard. It gets harder when there are multiple levels of government involved. At many significant life events, people must take multiple steps across many agencies and levels of government, and they're having trouble.
By connecting people to government services from a single place and providing a step-by-step guide to accessing these services, we're providing a way to navigate all the things they can and need to do when big things happen in their lives.
User as boss
We're taking direction from the people who use our services, and we proactively seek their advice and insight. Research is integral to this, and we're talking to users through regular interviews, comprehension testing, usability testing and workshops.
We are also making use of the conversations that have come before us. We're actively engaged with our end of life research team (we shared some of the learnings from that, and we're dissecting learnings from governments who have made progress on this before us - we're going over the Digital Transformation Agency's life journey mapping with a fine-tooth comb and learned plenty from our UK and New Zealand counterparts too.
As we progress with each life journey, we also plan to partner with government and non-government stakeholders to ensure that we're building services that meet the needs of users.
Government, together
For this to work, we need to do this together. There's a lot of great work happening across government, but it's only useful if people can find and use it.
We're taking a collaborative approach that brings together people from across government to talk about what's best for people who access our services.
We're also connected in with the federal life events communities and sharing our research with other states to ensure our work has maximum impact.
Get involved
We're still in early stages, and we're taking an iterative approach, but in this first stage we're seeking content designers/contributors from across government to help us shape this work. We've already met with people from every NSW department, but we're still keen to meet more. If you think we'd benefit from talking to you, or have any questions about the project, please email lifejourneys@finance.nsw.gov.au.