Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia website

We utilised a collaborative service design approach to reimagine new pathways for parents to seek help online in addition to the helpline. This included an entire redesign of the PANDA website and digital experience. We adopted a human-centred design approach that took in user research, iterative user experience design and multiple rounds of interactive audience testing.

Through this process we developed and designed a new website that reorganised all information around parental segments and the symptoms they are experiencing as pathways for exploring content, resources, services and seeking help. It quickly became apparent that the existing brand identity was an obstacle to achieving the desired goals and outcomes for parents.

The organisation had an existing logo that needed to be retained, but the rest of the brand identity needed to be refreshed to deliver the type of experience needed for users. A refreshed brand identity was prototyped through the design and development of the new website. The new identity was driven by two guiding principles: to invite harmony and diffuse anxiety and increase accessibility and inclusivity.

All design elements including typefaces and colour choices were selected to achieve this outcome. The website has successfully achieved globally recognised accessible design WCAG 2.1 & ADA compliance. This new brand identity was created hand-in-hand with the digital design system to create a seamless experience across the site and continues to be rolled out across the organisation offline. The digital design system has been built to foster a shared language which is consistent, predictable, learnable and ultimately engaging to as broad cross-section of the community as possible.

For websites, people need to be able to find what they need, understand what they find, and use that to accomplish tasks. To achieve this all website content was re-written to enhance accessibility to vulnerable and economically challenged socio-economic parents.

The content across the site is written and tested to the Flesch-Kincaid level 8 reading ease, effectively a high school year 8 level of literacy. To support parents for whom English is a second language core resources have been translated into 40 different languages with a suite of materials including videos available on the website. Each of the 40 languages has been carefully integrated into the website so as to respect each language and its unique characteristics.

At the heart of the website is a mental health checklist which enables users to better understand the severity of their symptoms and promotes care pathways beyond the helpline. Checklists have been medically verified for 5 key audience groups:

• Expecting mums
• Expecting dads
• New mums
• New dads
• Partners and carers.

At the end of the checklist journey, users have the option to be emailed or anonymously download their results together with a page of curated content, information, articles and recovery stories based on the symptoms present in their checklist responses.

Whilst the new website was only launched in March 2022, the result is an intuitive, differentiated online experience that is already positively impacting families and access to the helpline.