State insurance regulator
Design Lead
Product Design
Service Design

Simplifying thousands of legislated classifications into an AI tool.

Each WorkCover insurance applicant is assigned one of 9,907 business classifications manually, affecting their annual payment. Misclassifications can cost a business significantly over time.

The preferred state has always been for self-classification, but how do you manage all that complexity?

    ROLE
    Design Lead
    YEAR
    2019
    TIMEFRAME
    3 months
    KEY LEGISLATION
    Workplace Injury Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2013 (Vic)
    DELIVERABLES & ACCOUNTABILITIES
    Prototyping, user research, solution design
    IMPACT
    Industry-first prototype that enables straight through processing
2 min read · This case study contains no sensitive information · Last updated 21 Feb 24
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We used the structure of the legislation to influence the nagivation and other UI design.

Applying service design principles to gathering requirements was critical on this project. The classification process is legislated, so we had to use it as a guide.

Understanding the overall steps in a journey format helped us understand how to transform the legislation into a self-service digital experience.

It's not just the sheer number of classifications, they're hard to guess as well. Details matter.
A cake company can be considered Manufacturing, Retailing or Food Services.

Unintuitive definitions were addressed by using metadata and AI to give users multiple chances to recheck their classification.

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We user tested our prototypes rigorously to guide design decisions.
By the time it was ready, we'd spoken to around 40 business owners.

Putting the law at the heart of our decision making worked, with an AI-supported prototype with 90+% accuracy.

Straight-through-processing was finally proved to be a feasible option, and my work was showcased to multiple industry partners within the WorkCover industry.

This was a challenging and fun project, with a deep level of subject matter complexity and an opportunity to influence the entire solution from the UI down to the algorithms themselves.