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Legal aid grants tracker

Giving people waiting on a legal aid decision real-time updates on their phone, instead of weeks of uncertainty.

Client
Legal Aid NSW
Year
2018–2019 pilot, then scaled
My role
[Your role]
Recognition
Silver, Sydney Design Awards 2020
Three Legal Aid NSW grants tracker screens: track your progress through received, assess and decide; a list of current and past applications; and urgent help information

The problem

People applying for legal aid faced anxiety and uncertainty while waiting for a grant decision, especially with a court date coming up. With no way to check progress, they called Legal Aid NSW and LawAccess NSW again and again for the same update.

What we did

  • Ran two co-design workshops with Legal Aid NSW clients in Haymarket and Liverpool.
  • Turned their ideas into prototypes and user tested them with 15 clients.
  • Ran a technical workshop to scope a first release: a grants tracker live by 30 June 2019.
  • Piloted real-time SMS updates and online tracking, then scaled up to multiple applications and more update types.
  • Led discovery for a wider client portal, which one stakeholder described as a grants tracker on steroids.
  • [What you personally led or decided]

Key insight

Push information to people before they have to chase it. Every update we sent was a phone call nobody had to make.

Outcome

  • THOUSANDSof legal aid applicants getting updates on their phones
  • SILVERSydney Design Awards 2020
  • 15 CLIENTStested the prototype before anything was built
  • NEXT STEPInsights fed straight into a full Legal Aid NSW client portal