With over 4 million Australians now over 65 and expected to live into their 80s, there are more people needing aged care than ever before. But many prefer to struggle independently for as long as possible rather than seek help. No-one wants to lose their independence. Many fear their choices, and don’t understand the range of possibilities.

The challenge is to help Australians make sense of the aged care landscape, understand what services and supports are available, and connect people with the right services to help them live independently for as long as possible: everything from subsidised travel to doctor's appointments, to help with housework if you're dealing with an injury. 

We needed to turn complexity into simplicity. We needed to guide people who might arrive with misconceptions about what kinds of care are available and introduce them to options that better suit their needs. 

Through a rigorous human-centred design process, we worked with the community to understand their fears, their needs, and motivations. Our mission was to do the hard work to make it simple for them. With that in mind, we built a solution centred on clarity and empathy, making it easier (and more engaging) for senior Australians and their support networks to find the support they need.

The solution is a website that resets users expectations and assumptions about aged care right at the start, making it clear this is about more than just going to a nursing home. It gives users an overview of the landscape, but also allows them to drill down into (many, many!) complex details and requirements in a way that is not overwhelming. 

It helps them assess their needs, compare services, and steps them through the aged care application process in a way that is humane, supportive and reassuring.

Head to Health is a multi-award winning part of the Australian government’s digital mental health strategy, helping consumers find trusted online programs and resources.

Although Australia is a world-leader in mental health literacy, a 2014 National Mental Health Commission found that many Australians still don’t get the support they need, in part because of the complexity of mental health as both topic and system.

Head to Health is designed to be a starting point for anyone looking for mental health support, at any end of the continuum. Co-designed with lived experience community members and mental health professionals, H2H provides a clear conceptual model of mental health, specialised advice for population groups including carers, and hundreds of trusted mental health programs and resources that consumers can access online at any time.

If consumers aren’t sure how to describe what they are experiencing, they can use Sam, a pseudo-chatbot that translates users’ descriptions of their own experiences into mental health terms and suggests resources that might be relevant.

Head to Health has proven to be highly effective, with around 25,000 unique visitors each month, with thousands of consumers being directed to specialised service providers that they might not have otherwise known about. It’s especially popular with medical professionals, who use it as a support with clients, and a number of Australian university courses point to the site as an introductory resource for students.

MindMatters was a benchmark program in the mental health sector. Funded by the Australian Department of Health and administered by Beyond Blue, it provided online professional development to secondary school staff so they could improve mental health outcomes for the entire school community.

Across 26 modules it had a suite of rich and creative media, including animations voiced by Adam Spencer and Hannah Gadsby, TV-style panel discussions hosted by Julia Zemiro and featuring experts such as Professor Ian Hickie, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and Andrew Fuller, and a Parks & Rec-style comedy series call The Eagleton Way, showing a fictional school putting ideas into practice. All this content was delivered on a sophisticated feature-rich online platform.

Liquid created every part of the content and the site, working closely with a range of specialist mental health organisations including Orygen, The Australian Psychological Association, Headspace, Reachout and Beyond Blue.

Over three years, MindMatters delivered more than 150,000 hours of recorded formal training (and even more informal training) to 50,000 staff in nearly 1500 secondary schools, some of whom sent emails to Beyond Blue saying it was the best professional development they had undertaken, and ACER completed several highly positive independent reviews of the program’s effectiveness.

In 2019, MindMatters was absorbed into a new initiative called BeYou.

Children with autism can face challenges in recognising and regulating emotions and behaviours. Secret Agent Society is a game-based program designed to teach these vital social skills.

Designed by Dr Renae Beaumont, SAS takes players on a journey to become secret agents, able to decipher clues about other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours, use an arsenal of tools and gadgets to manage their social interactions.

Across three levels, SAS presents mini-games and activities of increasing complexity—from simple emotional assessment puzzles to elaborate multi-part story-based scenarios where players solve mysteries and foil bandits. The game combines 3D animation, rich media, and a wide variety of interaction and story styles to create an effective intervention.

Multiple national and international controlled trials have demonstrated the effectiveness at SAS in helping kids attain successful levels of social and emotional functioning.

Raising a child is a challenging and complex task with large ramifications for wellbeing and function across the lifespan. Triple P, from the University of Queensland, is one of the most effective parenting programs in the world, and we worked with Triple P International and UQ to develop several online versions that retained the effectiveness of the face to face program while expanding reach.

The largest of these projects is Triple P Online Community, a series of online modules with instructional videos, lifestyles videos, podcasts, checklists and self-assessment activities, all wrapped in a mobile-friendly platform with social and game mechanics to build engagement, retention and personalisation.

A private social network is woven throughout the program, with a dashboard, feeds and automated cues so that participants can share their experiences with other parents and a trained facilitator-moderator.

All of the Triple P Online products demonstrated their effectiveness in controlled trials, including trials with low-income, low-education, at-risk families in South Central Los Angeles.

Not every effective health promotion tool needs to be a major platform. Sometimes all people need is the right information at the right time. We worked with St John Ambulance to develop three consumer-friendly first aid apps for mobile phones.

These apps are instructional and reference tools that provide life-saving information, making it easily on-hand in the event of an emergency.

1. MediProfiles allows users to store the medical profiles of friends and family so this information can be made readily available in an emergency.

2. Resuscitate demonstrates how to use a defibrillator and promotes the availability of defibrillators in public places. The app takes advantage of a few native iOS features, such as blowing into the microphone to simulate resuscitation.

3. First Aid is a handy step-by-step reference guide for medical emergencies and trauma. This award-winning St John app was ranked as the #1 First Aid app on both iOS and Android in Australia for four years, and was featured in magazines and on the Today Show.

After a national search for providers, CanTeen chose Liquid Interactive to design and build their online services directory for Youth Cancer Services.

Designed specifically for a youth audience, the CanTeen site was an important tool to help young people who live with the challenges of cancer to find services they needed for help.

Young people under 30 with cancer, and their families, have unique needs: physical, emotional, social and psychological.

We collaborated with CanTeen to help them build a search platform that would let Australian teens and their families around the country find the right supports. The site matches resources with the needs of the user and provides a reliable and private portal for information.