Rethinking how public systems communicate. A redesign of a government rates notice to reduce confusion, support demand and cognitive load.
Every rates cycle generated the same pattern.
Long call queues. Repeated questions. Confused customers. Staff spending hours explaining information that already existed on the page.
The notice had become normal because everyone was used to it.
Nobody had questioned whether the document itself was causing the problem.
The rates notice contained everything customers needed. It just didn’t communicate it.
Payment options competed for attention. Important information was buried in dense layouts, and the relationship between totals, instalments and due dates wasn’t immediately clear. Customers weren’t confused by council rates – they were confused by the way the information was presented.
Treating the notice as a user interface instead of a compliance document completely changed the design approach.
Clarity at scale: A redesigned rates notice built to answer the most common customer questions before they reached the call centre.
