Our work
Building a Support Website for Aged Care Sector Reform in Payload
Empowering better care at home.
With Australia’s aged care sector undergoing significant reform from November 1st 2025, there is a focus on support at home to help improve choice of care, transparency and flexibility. As the new changes put rights and choice at the centre, Keep Able helps support workers and Community Aged Care Staff to meet the standards and help to deliver care that keeps this sector feeling empowered and active.
Keep Able equips providers and support workers with a free online hub designed to make life easier for those in the aged care sector, providing a wealth of ready-to-use tools, training and resources. Their goal is to help people carry on doing the things they love for longer.
iLA Keep Able needed a modern platform that could reflect these goals and serve as a scalable, community-driven resource to help more clearly the providers of home-based aged care services. As the website is such an intrinsic part of the program, KeepAble approached Hatchd to ideate, design and deliver their new site. With a wealth of content, it had to be designed as such that it would embed wellness and reablement principles front and centre with improved outcomes that could be tracked.
It was crucial for their team that the website be easy to maintain and update, ultimately making it easier for those behind the scenes with their marketing and content.
Identify & Prototype
Identifying User Needs in the Aged Care Sector
As a first step, we reviewed existing material from the UX audit and continued with thorough UX research on the current state, including putting together an existing site map to understand the scope of the site and how the pages related to each other.
We moved on to a competitor analysis to understand similar actors in the aged care space. From here, we drafted a new Information Architecture (IA) for the site that would allow for a seamless experience, prioritising easy access to resources and information on reablement.
We worked collaboratively with KeepAble to co-design the new IA. It was important to ensure that we accurately captured the best experience for their users. The key was to present their resources and information in the most intuitive way, avoiding overwhelm. It was really important to demonstrate clearly how the content related to each other.
With the new IA endorsed, we then created wireframes that best captured that experience, prioritising the mobile experience.
Design & Architect
Supporting Australia’s Aged Care Reform Through Enablement Advice
We worked within the iLA brand guidelines, creating a moodboard inspired by other web pages with preferred design directions and a desired look and feel. We defined imagery, colours and branding elements to start creating the building blocks of the modular design within the Payload CMS.
We iterated the look and feel with the iLA team to create an experience that would best resonate with their users and with the design direction and the set IA, we set about fleshing out the remaining designs and flows. These were prototyped for user testing using Askable and Maze.
We ran unmoderated user testing with 50 Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) professionals aged 30–60 from across Australia and asked them to complete a number of tasks on the mobile prototype. These ranged from testing the IA through to the success rate of finding key resources. Based on those insights, we slightly iterated the designs before moving into delivery, not to mention that the design of the site needed to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant for website accessibility and clear navigation. Throughout user validation testing, consideration of the audiences was a priority in terms of accessibility and the visibility that will bring to workers and clients within this space.
Next came the content planning spreadsheet. Working with the iLA content team, this was something they could easily populate with content across the various Payload CMS modules, ensuring a 1:1 mapping of content to the new website using the built modules.
Delivery
Delivering a Secure, Compliant Website in Payload CMS
Once the designs were endorsed, we began the delivery phase, pairing Next.js with Payload CMS. As our first project with Payload, and we were excited to explore its potential and see what we could do. Although a brand new tool for us, our team's expertise and experience with headless CMS platforms enabled us to quickly adapt and overcome any challenges.
This setup gave the development team flexibility to architect content schemas tailored to Keep Able’s needs and fulfilled the requirement for security and compliance for Australian data hosting. Payload’s defining feature is its code-first approach, tailored to create a fully custom headless CMS experience. We loved Payload for its CMS flexibility, awesome modular design and scalable content management. A perfect fit as Keep Able’s resources and information continue to grow.
Payload enabled the development of custom blocks, giving the Keep Able team the flexibility to create dynamic pages with ease. Additionally, we integrated Payload's Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality to provide a seamless user experience.
We also engaged with third-party penetration testers, Cyber CX who provided recommendations that were implemented prior to go-live.
With the development phase complete, we shifted focus to testing and quality assurance. The test team prepared detailed test cases and outlined the testing approach, which included thorough QA testing, accessibility checks, and user acceptance testing.
Ongoing support
This is not the end; it’s the beginning. We’re excited for what this site will become and as with all of our clients, for work that we create and develop we offer ongoing support and maintenance and will work alongside their team on future feature development.
For Hatchd, this project was an example of working towards an area that we believed in and were aligned with. The new aged care sector reform means that care, and control of that care, is put back into the hands of the person. Support tools such as this website will help to keep this population more enabled and moving for as long as they can to live the life they want to.
The new Keep Able site is expected to improve engagement with resources, increase uptake of its e-learning modules and better support aged care reform requirements. As aged care reform continues, we see digital platforms like Keep Able playing a critical role in empowering individuals, carers, and service providers alike.
As aged care reform drives digital transformation, we see platforms like Keep Able playing a critical role in empowering older Australians, their carers and the wider aged care sector.
Finally, what made this work feel effortless and rewarding is that the team at iLA Keep Able were fantastic to work beside. We can’t wait to see what more comes out of the sector in the near future and the incredibly valuable work that they will continue to do.
