Health Justice Australia
Aligning foundations with the future
The context
Health Justice Australia (HJA) was formed in support of a ‘quiet revolution’, with a goal of reshaping how health, legal and social services collaboratively support people in their time of need or when experiencing disadvantage.
For example, a low-income, sole parent is struggling to pay her recent toll road fines. During a doctor’s appointment she mentions she’s worried about having her licence suspended because of unpaid fines, potentially preventing her from making future mental health appointments for her child. She thought if she got a better job everything would be ok and she could pay back the money. But in the meantime, her child’s mental health deteriorated and was admitted to hospital. The mental health worker at the hospital connected her to a lawyer who helped to get the unpaid fines waived so that she could focus on regaining a sense of control, getting a better job and supporting her son.
As this example demonstrates, HJA’s work helps to build partnerships that enable professionals to address more than the problem that people initially present with. Their work breaks down the system silos through rigorous research, partnership and capacity building across sectors, and strategic advocacy work. After seven years of delivering meaningful impact across Australia, HJA had successfully grown beyond their start-up status and had a clear strategy for their next stage of growth to 2026 – to build HJA as a knowledge hub.
We worked alongside the HJA team and their audiences to re-think and re-position the organisation as they evolved into an established ‘Knowledge Hub’. We took a service design approach to support the team in defining and clarifying their full ecosystem of services and offers, as well as the systems, processes and capabilities that enable service delivery. Our efforts focused on what exists currently, but more importantly, on the capabilities and systems HJA will need in the future as they continue to grow and scale their impact.
As an organisation that relies on diverse range of funding sources, it was also important to look at how the services they offer can be packaged, described and experienced to align to HJA’s broader revenue strategy.
The approach
We took a ground-up approach to understanding the organisation, speaking with internal and external stakeholders to dig into current perspectives on HJA, challenges across the health and legal sectors, and the wants and needs into the future.
The sessions with HJA’s leadership team, sector practitioners, funders, sector partners, researchers and thought-leaders gave us a clear picture of the diversity of services, offers, platforms and touchpoints surrounding HJA and more broadly in the health and legal sectors.
We then unpacked the future by examining the different potential revenue streams and the HJA experience through the lens of different user archetypes. These future state activities helped us to better understand what HJA should offer to meet the needs of the sector and their audiences, the different reasons why people would engage with HJA and what they needed to do first to make this future a reality.
As a complement to the qualitative research, we also dug deep into web analytics and online search behaviours of HJA’s diverse audiences. This gave us a strong steer in terms of what people we’re looking for, both nationally and internationally. It also told us how well the HJA website was performing and where some of the biggest issues and opportunities were.
We took a fresh look at the HJA brand and evolved the identity in-line with this new phase of the organisation. The look and feel of the identity and the online experience was re-designed, and we worked closely with our development partner Smokee to bring the brand to life through a series of interactions and a set of experience principles that reflect the insights from our research.
Meeting complexity with clarity
Our activities across the project included:
- User and stakeholder research
- Ecosystem mapping
- Experience and journey mapping
- Development of user archetypes
- Refining IA, taxonomy
- Development of UX/UI design concepts
- Development of content principles and governance
- Evolving the brand identity
Outcomes and impact
Our insights from the quantitative and qualitative analysis helped to inform what would be required and helped to deliver on HJA’s 2026 strategy. By envisioning and defining this future state, we were able to identify the gaps between where HJA were and where they wanted to be, and capture the capabilities and skills required to deliver on this. This helped to create a detailed roadmap for achieving the goal of further developing HJA as a knowledge hub.
For HJA, the collaborative work we did acted as a guidepost for decision-making ensuring that all initiatives and activities aligned with the organisation's strategy and objectives, and contributed to its success and impact as a Knowledge Hub.
You can learn more about who Health Justice Australia are and what they do by visiting their newly developed website.
This project was recognised in Australia’s International Good Design Awards in 2024 for Excellence in Design and Innovation, and received an accolade in 2x categories; Design Strategy, and Digital Design Web Design and Development.
