2024-2025
Designing Better Policy Framework
While at Tobias Australia, I worked with the Australian Government's Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing (DoHDA) to reimagine how digital health policy is designed and developed across government. Health policy teams in Australia routinely work within complex systems, fragmented silos, and tight timelines - resulting in stakeholder misalignment and low public confidence in policy-making. DoHDA needed a new approach: repeatable, scalable, evidence-based, and firmly human-centred. The Designing Better Policy Framework was designed to be exactly that.
The BRIEF
How might we reimagine policy design and development in Australia so that it can adapt to our complex and rapidly evolving public health landscape?
The Approach
An in-depth Current State analysis and collaborative exploration of an ideal Future State, supported by iterative product design and capability uplift.
We began with an in-depth Current State analysis (interviews, live project observations, and a review of academic and government literature) to understand how policy was actually being made, and where it was breaking down. From there, we collaboratively explored and tested a Future State approach alongside stakeholders and policy-makers through design workshops, skill benchmarking, in-situ project testing, and expert interviews.
Image source: Tobias Australia
The Solution
The Designing Better Policy Framework - a Future State policy-making roadmap supported by a suite of practical tools, templates, and guidelines delivered alongside training workshops.
The Framework includes a Playbook and Toolkit, a Policy Lifecycle model, and a Roadmap for Change - all designed to embed more consistent, human-centred approaches to policy design across government teams. As Experience Designer, I led the digital design and development of the Playbook, and played a key role in stakeholder research, synthesis, and visualisation across the project.
Image source: Tobias Australia
The Impact
The cultural shift and practical adoption of human-centred, data-driven, and scalable approaches to digital health policy-making in Australia.
The Framework established a practical foundation for embedding human-centred design into digital health policy at scale. Beyond the immediate deliverables, it contributed to a broader cultural shift toward more transparent, traceable, and iterative decision-making - and ultimately, better outcomes for the Australian public.
Image source: Tobias Australia
AWARDS
This project received two Australian Good Design Awards in 2025:
Design Strategy (Gold Winner)
Policy Design (Winner)
Image source: Tobias Australia