SmartStart is designed to alleviate the pain and frustration of having to deal with multiple government agencies during the stress and excitement of impending parenthood. Making it easy to navigate the maze of government services and entitlements for birth and beyond – like finding a midwife, adjusting welfare payments, applying for parental leave etc.
SmartStart won a Silver Pin in the Public Good category of the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards 2017.
Led by DIA the SmartStart project required four prominent government agencies to work together, with the support of Plunket and the NZ College of Midwives, to deliver a parenthood ‘one stop shop’ in a single, responsive application.
Website: www.smartstart.services.govt.nz
A warm illustrated style was developed to match the content – an approach validated by government agencies, users and cultural advisors.
Mums and Dads from within the team fed into the various illustration concepts to produce universal moments in the pregnancy and early parenthood journey – that first moment of skin to skin contact, siblings meeting the new addition, baby’s first bath etc.
A personalised timeline helps users navigate the site, you can create your own to do list and keep track of your progress, and find out what you need to do and when you need to do it.
Having all this useful information in one place saves you time, and you can access it anywhere, anytime, on any device.
“SmartStart is the first successful integrated digital service across multiple agencies including the Ministry of Social Development, Internal Affairs, Ministry of Health, Inland Revenue, Plunket and NZ Midwives.”
Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne
Since it’s initial launch additional features such as ‘Services near me’ and ‘Entitlements’ have been added. This helps parents make sure they’re not missing out on financial help, and discover the people in their local area who can help.
The SmartStart team were focussed on building a customer-centred service that could be responsive to changing customer needs. The priority of the SmartStart team was to deliver value for users quickly, and backfill as required, rather than trying to boil the ocean in one go.
As far as we can see, the approach taken got the balance right in delivering value in a timely manner through prioritising user needs, but building on a modular, extendable and integratable architecture that could be improved over time. (Referenced from SmartStart: a federated service life event story by Pia Andrews)