The Challenge
QBuild is the Queensland Government’s in-house builder and contractor, operating under the Department of Housing and Public Works. QBuild has over 1700 staff across multiple sites, provides professional and technical services including planning, building, maintenance and emergency response. They embarked on a journey to create a ‘one-stop-shop’ digital platform for tradespeople and their supervisors to support the job fulfillment process. QBuild commissioned a service design project to create a prototype portal for staff members to manage, view and access required information as well as inputting data. The prototype aimed to allow staff (both in field and in office locations across metropolitan, regional and rural Queensland) to interact with back-end systems with any necessary workflows included.
Our Response
As part of our user-centred service design approach, the discovery phase focused on deeply understanding the current state of system use and the lived experience of staff managing the job fulfilment process. We combined a desktop review of existing documentation with observational studies and in-depth interviews to uncover how the system is currently used, where it supports staff, and where it creates friction.
Through this research, we identified ten key themes and developed six actionable recommendations to inform the future direction of the service. These insights played a critical role in shaping early thinking for the future state system. They directly fed into the next stage of our process—user testing and prototype development—ensuring that the evolving solution remained grounded in real user needs and behaviours. This iterative, evidence-based approach enabled QBuild to move forward with confidence toward a more effective and user-aligned system.
The Impact
ThinkPlaceX provided QBuild with robust, evidence-based insights to support its digital transformation journey—helping the department align with industry best practice and positioning it for continued relevance as Queensland advances toward 2032 and beyond. Our work went beyond delivering and testing a prototype for the job fulfilment process; we generated the data, user evidence, and strategic direction needed to inform next steps with confidence. The research-backed insights offered a clear, actionable pathway forward—grounding QBuild’s transformation in the real needs and experiences of its workforce.
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