Designed a centralized payment management experience for the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR), improving self-service capability for 273,000+ heavy vehicle operators while reducing manual finance administration and reporting.
Results & Impact
- Designed for the NHVR Go platform supporting 273,000+ heavy vehicle operators
- Reduced reliance on manual payment processing workflows
- Improved self-service payment management experience reducing the need for customer support requests
- Simplified complex regulatory payment workflows into a centralized system
- Increased consistency across payment-related customer journeys
Background
The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) is Australia’s independent regulator for all vehicles over 4.5 tonnes mass. The NHVR is the first contact point for over 273,000 heavy vehicle operators.
NHVR Go is the digital platform for heavy vehicle operators to apply and pay for accreditation and access permits which are mandatory requirements for operators.
My Role
As a Senior UX/UI Designer I led the end-to-end design in collaboration with a cross-functional agile team dedicated to the NHVR customer portal.
What I Did
- User research: I planned and conducted research with customers and business stakeholders.
- Workshop facilitation with product, technical team and business stakeholders to gather requirements and validate designs.
- Stakeholder management: I engaged with a variety of stakeholders in the business such as executive, the accreditation team, finance team, customer support and change.
- Delivered design artefacts: User-flows, wireframes, prototypes, production ready UI design.
- Delivered in a cross-functional agile team (Product Owner, Technical Lead, Business Analyst, Developers x 3 and QA x 2).
The Problem
The Customer
The legacy customer platform was very limited in terms of its finance functionality, customers could only make one payment at a time at the end of a lengthy application flow and had to contact the finance department every time they wanted to get access to invoices. Both were time consuming and frustrating for the operator.
The Business
Further more, regulators were often required to process partial or full payments which had to be facilitated off-planform via a combination of spreadsheets, emails and a third party payment gateway portal. This was time consuming and left a messy paper trail for auditing.
The Team
This project needed to be delivered in conjunction with other projects to meet the 1st July 2026 release of the Heavy Vehicle Nation Law Reform, this was a Non-negotiable deadline. The competing deadlines meant time and scope were going to be tight.
Discovery
During the discovery phase I reviewed the legacy workflows, conducted user research and stakeholder requirements gathering workshops, reviewed user feedback and used the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to get a deeper understanding of pain points for both customers and the regulator administrators and finance teams.
Key takeaways
- Customer: The user applying for accreditation may not be the same user making the payment, they needed a quick way to access the payment screen without going through the whole application flow.
- Regulator: The user needed an all-in-one place to process refunds that includes a clear audit trail. Quickly and easily report on key metrics.
Design Process
After reviewing the discovery artefacts I began to map out the different ways a customer could access the pay screen.
Customer pathways to make a successful payment
Customer Accreditation application payment flow
Regulator processing a refund
Wireframes
Delivery
Once the flows were defined the UI design and prototypes came together quickly and efficiently using the NHVR Design System to build consistent screens. The designs went through multiple rounds of iterative refinements through collaboration in stakeholder workshops and working with the developers to navigate the technical limitations.
Accreditation application payment flow
In the legacy application flow the payment screen was the final step, we removed this to make it generic standalone screen so that it could be deep linked from anywhere in the platform or from off-platform channels like email, notifications or customer support.
Payment Centre to payment screen flow
Regulator refund flow
I added a refund workflow that allowed the regulator the flexibility to refund based on line items so that the vehicles refunded could be aligned to the accreditation and application and create a more details audit trail.
Reflections & Takeaway
- Due to competing deadlines with the new Heavy Vehicle National Law legislation scope was tight and some features had to be put into the product backlog for future development, which meant some screens had to be revised.
- Dues to business priority changes and a strict delivery deadline, access to customers was complex due to lack of time and privacy laws which meant out customer feedback and testing was limited.
- Balancing ongoing business requests with a simple user experience was challenging and often meant comprising the desired simplicity and pushing back on the priority of those requests.
- Collaborating with engineering early re-enforced how essential it is to meet a tight deadline.