01. Context and Business Goal

CPA Australia processes more than 14,000 applications annually across global markets. As a Senior UX Designer at Slalom, I led a 12 week discovery phase to redesign the end to end membership journey.

Business Goal

The primary objective was to increase membership volume and improve conversion rates by modernising digital infrastructure. CPA Australia needed to remain competitive against global bodies like CA ANZ and ACCA by reducing the time to value for applicants and lowering the high operational cost of manual assessments.

Team Makeup

The project was a collaborative effort between Slalom’s consultancy team and CPA Australia’s subject matter experts.

Slalom Delivery Team:

• Senior UX Designer (My Role): Responsible for end to end discovery, research, service blueprinting, and the design of the new ecosystem.
• Solution Owner / Product Owner: Managed the project roadmap, stakeholder expectations, and value definition.
• Tech Lead: Validated the technical feasibility of AI integrations and data mapping.
• Solution Architect: Designed the backend infrastructure to connect legacy databases with the new digital experience.

CPA Australia Stakeholders:

• Admissions SMEs: Provided deep domain expertise on membership pathways and assessment criteria.
• IT Department: Managed the integration requirements for existing member databases.
• Regional Operations: Representatives from key markets (Australia, New Zealand, India, and China) to ensure local compliance and cultural nuances.

02. Discovery Methodology

To address the systemic issues across applicants and assessors, I ran a structured discovery across four key regions: Australia, New Zealand, India, and China.

• Assessor deep dives

  Four 90-minute interviews with Lead Assessors to understand manual verification effort, pathway miscategorisation, and assessment bottlenecks.