The Challenge

Every month, registered employers across the black coal industry were filling in Excel spreadsheets and emailing them to CoalLSL for manual processing. The process was slow, error-prone, and introduced genuine compliance risk, personal employee data travelling unsecured through email, no audit trail, and no single source of truth.

For CoalLSL's internal levy processors, it meant chasing incorrect submissions, manually validating data, and managing an inbox as though it were a business system. For employers, especially larger organisations with complex payroll structures, it was a time sink that pulled in staff well beyond their intended involvement.

As a payroll manager, I get involved in CoalLSL tasks more than is necessary for my role.

Employer

Project Goals

Replace the Excel and email workflow with a secure, auditable online platform that gives employers a clear process for submitting levies, gives CoalLSL staff confidence in data quality, and to provide a discoverable single source of truth for employee service history, without adding complexity for either side.

Understanding the Users

Two distinct user groups shaped the design in entirely different ways.

Registered Employers ranged from sole contractors through to large mining companies with multi-site payroll teams. Their relationship with CoalLSL was largely compliance-driven, they needed to meet obligations without it consuming disproportionate time or creating confusion around calculations.

Levy Processors were CoalLSL staff responsible for validating submissions and recording them into the long service leave registry. Their pain was upstream: incorrect or incomplete data arriving through email that required manual follow-up before any processing could begin.

Separating these two personas early was critical. The platform needed to serve a complex, multi-step internal workflow while appearing straightforward to the employer on the other side.

Research Approach

Research centred on understanding how employers actually collected and prepared documentation before it ever reached Coal LSL, a step the organisation had limited visibility into.

The experience map revealed a clear pattern: both parties began the relationship with positive sentiment, employers accepted their obligations, CoalLSL staff were glad to start working with them, but friction escalated sharply at the documentation submission stage. Employers found it time-consuming and error-prone; processors found themselves in a loop of chasing corrections and corrections to corrections.

Design Process

Before touching prototyping tools, the process required careful mapping. CoalLSL's levy workflows were genuinely complex, multiple case types, adjustment processes, audit triggers, and multi-stage validation. Sketching screen layouts and workflow diagrams with annotations allowed the team to walk through every path before committing to a prototype.

Flowcharts were developed to define site architecture, where each process lived within the platform and how different user roles would navigate it. This was not decorative documentation; it was the essential foundation for getting stakeholder sign-off on a system that touched legal obligations and financial records.

A full clickable prototype was built covering the complete platform. This became the primary vehicle for engaging stakeholders and developers, allowing users to experience intended interactions between screens, surface edge cases that the research hadn't surfaced, and gave decision-makers a concrete view of what was being built before a line of code was written.

User feedback sessions were conducted remotely with task-based testing against the prototype to validate assumptions and identify friction before development began.

Outcomes

An MVP was delivered and made available to employers, the first time Coal LSL had an online channel for levy submission. The core compliance goal was met: employers could upload levy advice directly into the platform, eliminating the email and attachment workflow entirely.

The MVP marked the beginning of a longer improvement roadmap. There is meaningful work still to do on the employer-facing UI and processing workflows, the system exists and functions, but delivering a genuinely good experience for users at both ends remains the ongoing goal.

User Feedback

"My team like how they can track how their levy submission is going so they can be assured it has been submitted correctly. Like this transparency."

Employer

"Participating in feedback sessions make me feel like I am being listened to by Coal LSL and my opinion matters. I can make a difference."

Employer

"Information available can be interpreted in different ways, especially when figuring out levy calculations."

Employer

"As a payroll manager I get involved in Coal LSL tasks more than is necessary for my role."

Employer

The last two quotes are as important as the first two. They represent the UX debt that remains, particularly around levy calculation clarity and role boundary confusion for payroll staff, and they've directly shaped the next phase of the design roadmap.