As a Lead Design Strategist at Portable managing a team of designers, I was tasked with planning and overseeing the delivery of the project. I provided collaboration, critique and support to the Senior Design Strategist and Senior Producer delivering the project, and liaised and coordinated alignments with Portable’s Head of Technology as they delivered a complementary stream of work to document key technology requirements and considerations.
Leading the Beyond Blue project at Portable, I managed a team to redefine mental health service delivery, focusing on a community-centered approach. We developed a clear vision and roadmap for Beyond Blue, enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of mental health support through extensive community research and stakeholder engagement, thereby shaping a future where mental health services are more integrated and responsive.
This project taught me the critical importance of community-driven design in mental health initiatives. I learned that deeply understanding user journeys and pain points through direct engagement can help address assumptions and reveal second-order effects that may not be obvious. For example, everyone espoused the importance of choice and agency in website navigation pathways, but community perspectives revealed the anxiety that can occur from decision fatigue when presented with too many options.
Examples of the final behavioural archetypes (left) and behavioural journey maps (above).
Beyond Blue is Australia's leading mental health organisation offering a wide range of services to provide information and wellbeing support, including phone, email and web chat support to those seeking help. Beyond Blue's vision is to provide accessible, personalised, safe, and connected mental health support for every person in Australia, designed in partnership with the community.
The Productivity Commission’s inquiry into mental health (2020) showed the need for the development of person-centred mental health and suicide prevention systems. The report discussed some key influences on people’s mental health, examines the effect of mental health on people’s ability to participate and prosper in the community and workplace, and implications more generally for our economy and productivity.
In response to this, Beyond Blue defined a vision for "the Big Blue Door" – a seamless multimodal experience where each person can be supported in their mental health journey at any time. Beyond Blue is reimagining products, services and experiences to better serve the changing needs of the community and focus on providing preventative and proactive support.
Portable was engaged to define a clear vision for product and service experience improvement opportunities, and provide an understanding of Beyond Blue's current service users, how they engage with services, their desired experience across channels and how they navigate to and across services.
Beyond Blue is in the process of bringing its Big Blue Door vision to life to provide accessible, safe and connected mental health support and services for all people who engage with Beyond Blue.
In order to achieve the project outcomes, our approach was twofold:
We conducted a range of workshops and interviews with over 20+ stakeholders from across the business seeking to understand Beyond Blue as an organisation from internal processes, capabilities, technology and service perspectives. These activities enabled us to create a digital roadmap with Beyond Blue accounting for in-flight work, and business goals and creating a strong foundation to manage and grow digital services and infrastructure.