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To successfully meet this criterion, agencies will need to:

• understand the diversity of your users
• comply with legislation and standards, including the:
  • Disability Discrimination Act 1992
  • latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 
  • Australian Government Style Manual
• implement a feedback mechanism.

Conduct segmented user research: Go broad and deep on the learnings from Criterion 2 (‘Know your user’) by conducting targeted and ethical user research. Assess edge-cases to ensure your service captures and responds to unique circumstances and needs.

Use data-driven insights: Collect and analyse information about your different users to understand the different barriers they might experience when using your service. Eliminate these barriers through design and validate your solutions’ effectiveness with real-world users.

Include non-digital users: Test how easily users can access your service to understand the impact of the digital divide. Ensure those users have a voice in decisions affecting them. Design omni-channel pathways that cater to non-digital access and experiences that some users rely on to access government services.

Form partnerships: Where some types of users are under-represented in research or may require different or tailored approaches to reach and engage with, collaborate with other agencies, community groups or the private and not-for-profit sector to reach them.

Use existing standards as your baseline: Comply with legislation and standards to ensure your service uses best practice and meets the expectations for government services. Consider any specific legislation or policies relevant to your service as well as the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and should consider the government’s Style Manual.

Offer content in alternate formats: Offer content in different mediums (such as text, images and audio) and segment long documents or tutorials into chunks. Provide human-validated multilingual support for critical information. Evaluate your service with users who depend on assistive technology, integrate their feedback and resolve pain-points through design.

Consider different platforms: Prior to launch, comprehensively test your service across devices and platforms your users will access it through. Anticipate how content will appear on different devices in your designs and assess whether platform-specific interfaces either support or fail to meet accessibility standards. 

Design for affordability and connectivity: Design and develop your service to use as little bandwidth and data as possible. Where it suits the service, make it cache for offline access or offer downloadable, print-friendly versions of critical content.

Use accessible language: Use plain language in both your content and user interface to ensure your service is usable by all. Replace niche terminology or jargon with widely understood terms. Always adhere to the government’s Style Manual and plain language guidance.

Incorporate feedback: Offer users the ability to provide feedback, report issues and suggest service improvements. Promptly act on feedback and provide a timely, transparent response describing how it’s being actioned.

Raise awareness of your service: Plan an ongoing awareness campaign and deploy it across a variety of channels to reach your users. Consider training your frontline staff so they can inform, suggest or demonstrate the service to people.

Test

When to apply

Apply Criterion 4 throughout Beta(Opens in a new tab/window) to ensure smooth integration with other government services and systems. 

Adhere to this criterion across the Service Design and Delivery Process(Opens in a new tab/window) whenever new functionality, integrations or upgrades are introduced.

How to apply 

Questions for consideration

• how will this service integrate with existing systems and data?
• what standardised protocols will be used to exchange data?
• how will we test for smooth interoperability with other platforms?
• how will the service accommodate future growth and change?
• what information does government already hold that the service could reuse?
• which mechanisms will allow users to opt in or out of data sharing?

Share data: Always begin by reviewing your obligations against privacy policies and the Privacy Act (1988). If external data can be used, make your service interoperable and leverage governments’ open datasets. Support safe, ethical data sharing practices by using the government’s DATA Scheme(Opens in a new tab/window). 

Request information once: Assess the data your agency already collects and whether it can be reused to deliver your service. Where it can be reused, eliminate unnecessary data entry requests and fulfil a ‘tell us once’ approach.

Publish open APIs: Thoroughly document your service’s APIs. Where appropriate, open them for other services and third-parties to build upon existing government offerings. Align with the API Design Standard(Opens in a new tab/window) to support cross-jurisdictional data sharing, maintain a consistent, reusable vocabulary and support wider API literacy.

Plan for scale and flexibility: Ensure your service can cater for growth and changing preferences without impacting performance, functionality or stability. Embed adaptability into your design patterns from the outset to allow malleability as future changes may require.

Utilise a Digital ID: Where appropriate, endeavour to integrate the Australia Government Digital ID System, accredited by the Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF)(Opens in a new tab/window), to allow users to access your service with a single set of credentials.

To successfully meet this criterion, agencies will need to:

• design for interoperability
• join up services.