Service Tasmania
Before this portal existed, Tasmanians had no single digital home for government services. I designed the one that changed that.
Tags: Government, Citizen Portal, 0 → 1
What I Built
Complexities
The Outcome
Reflection
Tasmania had no unified citizen-facing digital portal. Government services, vehicle registration renewals, driver's licence renewals, fine payments, waste collection schedules, permit applications, health services, and dozens more, existed across fragmented sites, phone lines, and physical service centres.
For citizens, especially those in regional areas far from a service centre, this wasn't just inconvenient. It was a genuine barrier. The digital expectation had shifted, people expected to manage their relationship with government the same way they managed their bank, their healthcare, their shopping. Government hadn't kept up.
The brief was to design a citizen portal that brought all of these services into one coherent, accessible digital home.
I designed the end-to-end Service Tasmania citizen portal — the information architecture, navigation model, service taxonomy, and the key transactional flows citizens use most.
The portal unified 12 service categories spanning transport, health, housing, justice, education, recreation, identity, and more. Each category was structured to surface the most common citizen tasks immediately, renew vehicle registration, renew driver's licence, pay a fine, check collection schedules, while providing deeper navigation for less frequent but equally important services.
Transactional flows: I designed the key citizen journeys, licence renewal, vehicle registration, fine payment, permit applications, to be completable end-to-end online without requiring a call or a visit. Clear progress indicators, plain language instructions, and explicit confirmation states at every step.
myServiceTas account: a unified login layer allowing citizens to save their details, track active applications, and receive government communications in one place, reducing repeated data entry across multiple services.
Accessibility was a primary constraint throughout. The portal serves all Tasmanians, including elderly citizens, people with disabilities, and residents in areas with limited digital literacy or connectivity.
The information architecture challenge was significant. Government services don't naturally group the way citizens think about their lives. A citizen renewing a licence doesn't think 'transport', they think 'I need to sort my licence.' The taxonomy had to reflect how people actually arrive at tasks, not how government departments are organised.
I designed around life events and tasks rather than departmental structure, grouping services by what citizens are trying to accomplish, with multiple routes to every service for different mental models. The most common tasks surface immediately on the homepage; the deeper taxonomy exists for those who need it.
The accessibility requirement also shaped every decision. Plain language, high contrast, keyboard navigability, logical heading structure, and clear error states weren't add-ons, they were the baseline.
The Service Tasmania portal launched and is now the primary digital touchpoint for Tasmanian government services, serving over 550,000 residents. Citizens can renew licences, pay fines, apply for permits, access health and housing services, and manage their identity documents entirely online.
The myServiceTas account layer means returning citizens don't start from scratch, their details persist, their history is accessible, and communication from government arrives in one place rather than scattered across departments.
For a state with a significant regional population and historically high in-person service centre usage, moving these journeys online represents a meaningful shift in both citizen experience and government operational efficiency.
Service Tasmania sits alongside the UK Government myHub work as a reminder of why public sector UX matters as much as, and often more than, consumer product design. When your users include people who are elderly, digitally inexperienced, geographically isolated, or navigating a stressful life event, the cost of bad design isn't a poor NPS score. It's a person who can't access a service they're entitled to.
The similarity to the UK Government work is intentional. The pattern is the same: a fragmented, inaccessible system, a population who deserves better, and a design process that starts with the hardest user first.