Public Sector

NDS Australia

UX research and accessibility strategy for the website redesign of Australia's peak industry body for disability service organisations, representing more than 1,000 service providers across the country.

National Disability Services is the peak body for disability service providers in Australia, representing organisations that collectively deliver thousands of services to Australians with all types of disability.

Storm was engaged through 2DC agency to lead the UX research and accessibility strategy underpinning the NDS website redesign. The scope covered stakeholder and member interviews across organisations of varying size, Jobs to Be Done and Value Proposition Design synthesis, user journey mapping across six key touchpoints, a 160-respondent member survey with quantitative validation, and a comprehensive requirements report. The research applied an inclusive design lens throughout, addressing permanent, temporary, and situational accessibility as design constraints rather than compliance checkboxes.

The findings informed not just the information architecture and content strategy but the accessibility standards and design-to-development handoff protocols for the new platform.

To ensure that a website serving people with disability was designed from the evidence of their actual experience, not assumptions about it.

Research as the foundation, not the footnote.

Accessibility is not a feature. It is the starting point.

"This research will ensure that we base our decisions on insights, not assumptions."

Research framing statement to NDS stakeholders

Overview

NDS Australia is the peak body for the disability services sector, representing service providers, industry professionals, policy makers and allied health practitioners across the country. Their existing website had grown organically over years, serving members, non-members, sector professionals and internal staff with very different needs, but no shared structure to support them.

Ahead of a full website rebuild, NDS needed a discovery phase that could justify the investment to their management board and give the design team a genuine understanding of who they were building for. I led the UX and accessibility research for this phase, working through 2DC.

The Challenge

NDS's website served a wide and uneven audience: large and small disability service providers, allied health professionals, policy makers, advocacy groups, general registrants and casual visitors, plus the internal NDS team managing it all. Early conversations surfaced a consistent set of frustrations: unreliable search, inconsistent content organisation, no personalisation by role, and accessibility gaps that mattered more here than on most sites, given the sector NDS serves.

The brief was to move past assumptions and build a report grounded in real evidence, one that could stand behind a full-scale rebuild and win confidence from NDS's management.

Approach

Research ran across two phases: requirement-gathering workshops with the NDS team, followed by one-to-one interviews with members and staff to validate and deepen those early findings.

Workshops

Four half-day sessions with the NDS team, each focused on a different requirement area: functional, technical, integration and UX. Every session was recorded, transcribed and coded for recurring pain points and needs.

Interviews

Fifteen-plus interviews across NDS team members and member organisations spanning small, medium, large and XL scale, across five states and territories. This included a dedicated interview with a Lived Experience Network representative, giving the accessibility research a first-hand perspective rather than relying on staff assumptions about accessibility needs. Each interview was synthesised into a structured profile of jobs, pains and gains.

Frameworks

I used Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) and Value Proposition Design (VPD) to move past surface complaints and get at what people were actually trying to accomplish, and where the current site let them down. Every finding was mapped against a Fit analysis across three dimensions:

Problem-solution fit — does a proposed change solve a real, evidenced problem
Product-market fit — does it serve NDS's actual mix of user segments
Business model fit — does it support NDS's operational and growth goals

This kept the research disciplined. Nothing made it into the final recommendations without a job, a pain, and a reason it mattered to NDS as a business.

Inclusive design lens

Given NDS's role in the disability sector, accessibility was framed through permanent, temporary and situational impairment, not just diagnosed disability. That lens shaped how interview questions were asked and kept the accessibility recommendations broader than any single user group.

Key UX Findings

Patterns held consistently across both staff and member interviews:

Search and navigation were the most cited frustration across every segment. Results felt inconsistent, filters didn't reflect what people were searching for, and content wasn't ordered in any way that matched how people looked for it.

No content personalisation. Every user, regardless of role or organisation size, saw the same undifferentiated site. Members repeatedly asked for content shaped around their role, sector and interests.

Content decay. Outdated resources sat alongside current ones with no archiving process, undermining trust in what was accurate.

Disconnected event and CRM workflows. Manual processes around events, registrations and member communications created friction for both staff and members.

Unclear value. Several members, particularly smaller organisations, weren't confident the website reflected the actual value of their membership.

"The search function doesn't always give me what I'm looking for. I end up spending a lot of time clicking through pages to find something specific."

NDS team member, Sector Support & Development

Validated at scale

A concurrent NDS member survey (N=160) backed up what the interviews surfaced. Only 55% of respondents rated the website's search functionality as good or very good, only 53% rated the clarity of membership benefits the same way, and just 33% named the website itself as a useful communication channel, against 81% for breaking news updates. The qualitative pain points and the quantitative data pointed at the same problems.

"Our goal is to have CRM as the single source of truth, but our current setup only captures partial activity data."

NDS team member, Integration Workshop

Accessibility Findings

Because of NDS's role in the disability sector, accessibility wasn't treated as a compliance checkbox, it was core to the brief. Research included a participant from NDS's own Lived Experience Network, who consults on the organisation's disability awareness training and brought a first-hand accessibility perspective alongside the staff and member interviews.

Staff and members flagged a lack of adjustable contrast, limited screen reader support, and no read-easy content versions.

Feedback suggested accessibility needs varied significantly by which part of NDS's audience was engaging, with staff noting that adjacent disability and aged-care focused sites received more direct accessibility feedback due to closer engagement with end users.

There was no structured way to capture or act on accessibility feedback when it did come in, beyond an open free-text field.

Leadership was clear that accessibility should be the baseline everywhere, not an add-on for specific tiers or user groups, including for lead-generation forms that are often the least accessible part of a site.

WCAG 2.2

AA baseline, AAA target Applied across colour contrast, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility and plain-language content options for every new design and content decision. Surface-level accessibility toggles (read-aloud, resize, colour switchers) were deliberately ruled out in favour of building AA/AAA compliance into the design system itself.

"The base should be that all touchpoints are accessible, and then we add on."

NDS leadership, UX Workshop

"We go to the extreme, cater to someone who needs to hear with a screen reader. If we can cover that, we've covered a lot."

NDS leadership, UX Workshop

User Journey

Individual interviews were synthesised into stage-by-stage jobs, pains, gains and emotions for each participant, then rolled up into a composite journey across the six touchpoints that came up most consistently, from first discovering the site through to submitting feedback. Mapping it this way made the emotional low points, and where the research pointed for fixing them, immediately visible to stakeholders who hadn't sat in on the interviews themselves.

The dip at Search and the smaller dip at Feedback were the two lowest points across every persona interviewed, staff and members alike, which is what pushed both into the top recommendations rather than treating them as isolated complaints.

Customer Segments

NDS's membership base isn't one audience, it's ten, ranging from XL sector-leading providers to casual sector subscribers who've never converted. To make sense of where each segment sits relative to the others, segments were plotted against two axes: how often they interact with NDS, and how complex their needs are.

Strategic Partners

Strategic Partners (XL Providers, Industry Professionals) justified the heaviest investment, role-based dashboards and deep advocacy tooling. High-Stakes Specialists (Policy Makers, Advocacy Groups) interact less often but need a level of precision that a generic content feed can't deliver. Casual Explorers (Sector Subscribers, NDP Members) needed the lowest-friction path to see value before any redesign asked more of them. This placement, rather than a flat list of segments, is what shaped which recommendations got prioritised first.

Laying the same segments against the specific needs pulled from JTBD synthesis made the overlaps visible, where a single design decision (a personalised dashboard, say) would land for six segments at once rather than one.

Recommendations

The research translated into a set of prioritised, evidence-backed recommendations, reframed as five service principles the redesign had to hold to:

Accessibility Handoff

Example ARIA Patterns

WCAG targets tell a development team what to hit, not how to build it. To close that gap, research findings were translated into example markup patterns addressing the specific issues this project surfaced, giving developers a concrete starting point alongside the compliance target.

html

Search

<div role="search">
<label for="site-search">Search resources</label>
<input type="search" id="site-search" aria-describedby="search-hint" />
<span id="search-hint" class="visually-hidden">
Searches training, policy and event content across NDS
</span>
</div>

Addresses the unlabelled, inconsistent search pattern raised repeatedly in interviews.

html

Filters

<fieldset aria-labelledby="filter-heading">
<legend id="filter-heading">Filter results</legend>
<button aria-pressed="false" aria-controls="results-list">
Workforce resources
</button>
</fieldset>

aria-pressed communicates filter state, aria-controls ties the filter to the results it affects, directly answering the "filters don't reflect the outcomes" finding.

html

Role-based dashboard cards

<section aria-labelledby="dashboard-heading">
<h2 id="dashboard-heading">Your dashboard</h2>
<article aria-label="Upcoming: Workforce Virtual Conference, 12 March">
...
</article>
</section>

Gives each personalised card a clear accessible name, important once content becomes role-based and less predictable in structure.

html

Event registration

<form aria-describedby="form-status">
<div role="status" id="form-status" aria-live="polite"></div>
<label for="event-name">Full name</label>
<input id="event-name" required aria-required="true" />
</form>

The live region announces registration success or errors without a page reload, addressing the confusing event and CRM workflows members described.

These are illustrative patterns, not final markup, but they show the kind of design-to-dev handoff documentation that sat alongside the WCAG 2.2 AA/AAA target.

Outcome

The final report gave NDS's management a clear, evidence-based case for the full-scale rebuild, structured around real user segments rather than assumptions. It set the accessibility bar for the project from day one, rather than treating it as a late-stage audit, and gave the design team a validated foundation of jobs, pains and gains to design against going into the next phase.

Independent by brief. Connected by philosophy.

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