Brief
The brief was to create a website that will serve as a digital hub for people with intellectual disabilities who require mental health support. This would also cater to parents and carers and health professionals as secondary audiences.

Approach
We held three two-hour-long Zoom co-design workshops attended by 14 participants with lived experience of one of more disabilities, including an intellectual disability. The participants either had one or more disabilities themselves (10 participants) or were the carers of people with an intellectual disability (4 participants). A representative of VALID (Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability: valid.org.au) also attended.

Workshop participants were thoughtful, eloquent and candid and shared many relevant insights that have informed this brief and will help us to ensure the Hub respects and meets their needs with an inclusive and human-centred approach and helps them to thrive. A key phrase used by the participants that we have adopted for the Hub was “Nothing About us, Without Us”.

From here we wrote a reverse brief, which formed the basis for the sitemap, website design, development and overall user journey.

Testing with a Lived Experience Team from VALID allowed us to get real time invaluable feedback from the core audience on the design through to the development.

Result

We worked with Monash Health to develop and deliver My Lived iD, a new digital hub that aims to bridge the digital service and information gap for people with intellectual disability.

The online hub and directory of service providers is designed to provide people with intellectual disability access to the information, resources, and healthcare services they need to support their mental health and wellbeing.

The website caters to the 3 key audiences via a dropdown option in the header, with the default design being that for the main audience which was people with intellectual disability. Choosing which audience you are will change the overall colour and content of the website to be catered to you, including easy read articles and resources for the Person with Disability and Parent/Carer audiences.

We also did the videography for a How to use this website video on the home page and the Stories of people with lived experience.

This was a truly inclusive and accessibility focused project. Our role included facilitating co-design sessions with people with intellectual disability, lived experience reviews and UX testing, ensuring content and messaging met AA accessibility standards, developing a comprehensive style guide for the hub, videography…and so much more.

Please check it out for yourself. www.mylivedid.org.au