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Use a multi-disciplinary team: Consider tools and techniques based on agile values and principles. Engage a multidisciplinary team to understand the whole problem and create an effective solution. Monitor time and effort expended to understand and refine whole-of-life investment costs from the outset. 

From 1 January 2026, services that meet the following criteria, will be required to meet the Digital Inclusion Standard:

• public-facing; and
• owned by non-corporate Commonwealth entities; and
• all existing informational and transactional services

Note: existing staff-facing services are excluded

Listen carefully for implicit and explicit needs: During user research, discuss their daily lives and observe their real-world actions to contextualise their needs. Use a discussion guide to capture all facets of their experience. While some needs or pain points will be stated explicitly, pay attention to small or superfluous details to recognise the implicit ones. Use at least two methods of user research (such as open-ended interviews and observing users completing relevant tasks) to ensure what they say matches what they do.

Begin with pain points: Identify and address the most common pain points your service should address. Prioritise them by most impactful (which isn’t necessarily the number of users affected). Adopt continuous improvement to address pain points which emerge after launch or upgrades.

Observe usage patterns: Use various data sources to identify how frequently different users might use your service. Stress test your solution for pain-points along task journeys and assess load-bearing capacity during peak periods.

Map experiences: Use visual aids to ensure the breadth of user interactions are captured and your team works from a shared understanding. Build, test and refine journey maps and job stories to understand users’ end-to-end journeys and behind the scenes processes, reduce unintentional duplication and communicate findings.

Test your assumptions: Validate assumptions made in Criterion 1 (‘Have a clear intent’). Conducting qualitative user research directly with people who may be impacted by your service, will provide you with either confirmation that you’re on the right track, or that you are solving the wrong problem and need to adapt your approach.

Gather different perspectives: Undertake ethical and inclusive user research to capture a breadth of needs and capabilities. Zoom out and consider how your digital service interacts with your agency’s wider methods of service delivery. It is helpful to zoom in and out of your problem space to observe the different perspectives and impacts of the service you are designing, and to explore how the problem may manifest at macro and micro levels.

Embed co-design: Where appropriate, use co-design to involve users and stakeholders, and demonstrate transparent, equitable decision making. Avoid tokenism by meeting people’s physical, cultural and psychological safety needs in your consultations. Maintain ongoing user engagement to keep your service fit for purpose and address changing needs over the course of people’s lives.

Engage designers: Ensure your team has the expertise to elicit and interpret useful information from users’ personal experiences. Use service designers and user experience (UX) designers to conduct user research, map experiences and design your service to meet and surpass the needs of all users.

Apply Criterion 2 during the Discovery phase to validate initial assumptions made in Criterion 1 (‘Have a clear intent’). Test and validate the service with users as knowledge of the problem grows.

User needs aren’t static. Revisit this criterion across the Service design and delivery process to provide reliable, accessible services to users, when they need them.

The implementation of Version 2.0 of the Standard will be phased to give agencies time to plan and update their services:

• phase 1- new services
• phase 2 - existing public-facing services 

The Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) website will be updated to include Version 2.0 of the Standard, replacing Version 1.0 (refer to the Australian Government Architecture website).