NCAT case filing redesign

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal hears matters that most people will face once in their life and never again — a tenancy dispute, a guardianship application, a consumer claim. The filing experience is the front door to all of it, and it is used almost entirely by people who have no reason to understand tribunal procedure.

That is the constraint the whole redesign turns on. A filing form is not a form in the marketing sense. Every field is downstream of a legislative instrument, a registry workflow, and a case-management system that will reject a malformed application without explaining why.

What the work covered

The engagement ran from research through to detailed interaction design, rather than stopping at a concept. In practice that meant three overlapping streams.

• Research with both sides of the counter — applicants attempting to lodge, and registry staff processing what arrives. The second group is the one usually skipped, and the one that knows exactly which fields generate rework.
• A service blueprint covering lodgement through to listing, so the design conversation could name which step owned which decision instead of arguing about screens.
• Detailed interaction design for the filing flow itself — question sequencing, conditional logic, error recovery, and the evidence-upload path.

The awkward part

Most of the difficulty in government forms is not visual. It is that the legislation, the registry process and the applicant’s mental model disagree about what a "matter" is, and someone has to decide which one the interface will speak. That decision is not a design preference; it changes who bears the cost of the mismatch.

A form that is easy to fill in and impossible to process has moved the work, not removed it.

Alongside the filing redesign the engagement included guiding the external PACS portal build and running accessibility reviews of the PACS and LAMA case-management systems — the same standard applied to the internal tools, not only the public-facing ones.

What carried over

The form patterns established here — one substantive question per step, plain-language error text written against the actual rejection reason, and evidence upload treated as a first-class step rather than an afterthought — became the reference set carried into later government work.