Supporting Australian agriculture by shifting from systems to services
Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment
Two thirds of Australian agricultural produce is exported. Australian farmers and regional communities need access to global markets to thrive. Collaborating with agricultural producers, policymakers, and digital teams; we launched a digital service that makes it easier to export from Australia, transforming the way Australian producers operate on the world stage.
To export, agricultural producers navigate fragmented systems and paper-based processes — generating excess admin overhead and compliance burden, all while dealing with the timeline attached to fresh produce. This locks producers out of global markets, leading to lost revenue, jobs, and impacting growth for rural communities. Our brief was to lay the foundations for a new, digitally-enabled export service — that streamlined the regulation that upholds Australia’s reputation for global produce quality and made it easy for Australian producers to access global markets.
Approach
Over 6 months, I worked as the designer in a core team (alongside a product manager, strategist/researcher, developer and fellow designer) as we collaborated with policymakers, regulators, digital teams, and agricultural producers to launch the new Export Service.
Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. So we started with the most critical tasks;
Streamlining registering export establishments so producers can access global markets faster.
Making it easy to understand and manage compliance requirements
Establishing a single channel for all interactions with the Department, reducing the administrative burden for producers and internal teams
The Export Service - where exporters manage export registration and regulation tasks was designed, developed, tested and Beta launched. We tested over 7 testing rounds engaging with over 35 producers and 50 industry experts.
Highlights
Building a foundation for better Government digital design
Working on this large-scale project provided the opportunity to develop a design system optimised for accessibility and scaled development in the Government context. Many designers throughout this program of work had interfaced with various versions of the ‘Australian Government Design System’ - an attempt at a consistent Commonwealth Government design system that never manage to find it’s legs (or consistent funding). As one of the first designers on the project I had the opportunity to contribute to the foundational development of the open source Agriculture Design System (AgDS).
AgDS is based on the GOLD Design System which incorporates the highest usability and accessibility standards, helping us to deliver a consistent experience for all users, in line with the Digital Service Standard.
Impact
The new Export Service has delivered real change — for Australian agricultural producers and the Department. For producers, we made the export registration process easier; reducing effort, admin overhead, and compliance burden and turning 10+ page paper forms into simple, human-centred processes.
On average, our digital service is giving back an average of 51 minutes to a business per transaction compared to the paper form.
It’s not enough to translate paper forms into digital forms. We extensively simplified the experience by breaking down the paper process and re-organising it around specific user tasks. Building for all channels. No matter how intuitive a digital service is, it will always need human support. We added clear signposting and handoff points to allow human support and guidance teams to more effectively help exporters. This approach, along with the reusable foundations, has allowed the department to create new services rapidly — and stay flexible in the face of unpredictable events
