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Design & Strategy  ·  Newcastle, NSW

I help organisations
find the real problem
and act on it.

Most useful when the brief is wrong, the stakeholders aren't aligned, and someone needs to figure out what the work actually is.

Fifteen years across health, disability, and telecoms. I facilitate, research, and design. And I stay close enough to the work to see if it worked.

Curious, direct, and good in a room.

I've spent most of my career in large, complex organisations where the brief is rarely what it seems. Getting to the right answer takes as much people skill as design skill, and often more patience than either.

The work I'm most proud of started as one thing and became something else entirely. That's usually the sign it was done properly.

What I do
i.
Discovery & Facilitation
Workshops, stakeholder alignment, and problem framing. Getting the right people in the room and making sure the session produces something useful.
Best when: you don't know what the right problem is yet.
ii.
Design Strategy
Defining what your organisation should build and why. Roadmaps, design practice development, and the layer that makes execution coherent.
Best when: activity is high but direction is unclear.
iii.
Experience Design
UX, service design, journey mapping, and research. Hands-on or in a directing role, depending on what the project needs.
Best when: you need someone who can lead and do.
Selected work
All projects →
Service DesignFacilitationNon-profit

Foster Care Recruitment Journey

A website brief that became a full rethink of how a national organisation recruits and assesses prospective carers.

Website redesign
Life Without Barriers · 2021
5× increase in qualified leads
Process DesignHealth

NDIS Financial Process Redesign

Dozens of divergent financial practices across residential care sites, unified into one national system in under six months.

Process mapping
Life Without Barriers · 2018
$1.2M reclaimed annually

Let's talk about the problem first.

I start every engagement with a conversation. No scope, no commitment. If the problem is interesting and the fit is right, we take it from there.

Background

Fifteen years across health, disability, and telecoms. Organisations large enough to have real complexity, and mission-driven enough to make the work matter.

Currently available for consulting engagements and open to the right employment opportunity.

Work with me →
Experience
Life Without Barriers
Design Manager
2017–2025
Optus
Senior UX Designer
2016–2017
nib Health Funds
UX Designer → Senior
2011–2015

Work

A selection of projects across service design, digital experience, and organisational strategy. Some started as one thing and became another. That's usually the sign something was done properly.

Service DesignFacilitationNon-profit

Foster Care Recruitment Journey

Life Without Barriers asked for a website redesign. Discovery told a different story. The online experience wasn't the problem, the process behind it was. Prospective carers were falling through gaps between states, with inconsistent follow-up and no central visibility.

We redesigned the full enquiry journey: new central team, new scripts and assessment criteria, new site. The brief that started as "fix the website" ended as a national service redesign.

The call I made

The turning point was a decision to approach discovery as if we genuinely didn't know the answer even though our sponsors had handed us a brief that implied we did. Early workshops brought together stakeholders who had never been in the same room: prospective carers, case managers, state-based recruiters, and central leadership. What surfaced was a set of process failures that no website could fix.

That workshop could easily have been skipped. Taking the brief at face value would have been faster, and nobody would have pushed back. But it would have delivered the wrong thing with confidence.

5×
Lead volume
National
Alignment achieved
Carer support page · Life Without Barriers
From discovery

Journey mapping workshops revealed that prospective carers were falling through gaps no one had visibility over. The problem was never the website.

Process DesignProductHealth

NDIS Financial Process Redesign

In 2017, Life Without Barriers was struggling to adapt to the NDIS individual funding model. Dozens of residential care sites were running their own financial processes, none of them claiming accurately or consistently.

We embedded with affected staff, mapped the real process through contextual enquiry and journey mapping, then designed and shipped a national tool in under six months. Within nine months it had been rolled out across the country.

The call I made

The initial brief described a system problem, but early conversations made it clear that nobody had actually sat with the people doing the work to understand what was happening day-to-day versus what was supposed to happen.

The call was to push past the documented process and dig into the real one. That meant contextual enquiry: sitting with staff in their actual environment, watching them work, asking why. What we found was a gap between official procedure and lived reality that no amount of system redesign would fix without first understanding it. That fieldwork was the project.

$1.2M
Reclaimed annually
6 yrs
Still in production
Process consolidation · SACA
The approach

Contextual enquiry, semi-structured interviews, and journey mapping. Then fast MVP delivery to a single region before scaling nationally.

CROExperimentationInsurance

nib Quote Test

Rather than proceed with a planned full redesign, I made the case to run a live experiment first. Built a mobile-optimised quote variant in four weeks, ran it against real traffic, and proved the lift before anyone committed to the larger project.

Single-variable discipline, proper sample sizing, weekly decisions shared openly with the team. The result shaped the direction of the bigger project.

The call I made

Before pitching the experiment, I ran a series of stakeholder interviews. Not just to understand what people needed, but to seed the thinking. By the time I made the formal case, I already knew which concerns to address and how to frame the opportunity for each audience.

The argument for testing rather than redesigning made itself, because I could present it with clarity: here are our goals, our timeline, our resource spend, what we know and don't know, what we expect to learn, and what we'll do with the result. I also made it clear that anyone could walk into the team at any point and understand exactly what was happening and why. That transparency was itself part of the pitch.

11.5%
Sales uplift
4 wks
Concept to live
ControlVariant (+11.5%)A/B test · nib quote flow

Get in touch

I'm available for consulting engagements (facilitation, strategy, design) and open to the right employment opportunity. If the problem sounds interesting, drop me a line.

Emailtimhogandesign@gmail.com
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/timhogandesign
Phone0409 744 120
LocationNewcastle, NSW (remote friendly)

For consulting: I typically start with a short conversation to understand the brief before committing to scope. No charge for that. If it sounds like a good fit, we go from there.