Challenge
A community with a lot to juggle.
Westminster, one of South Australia’s leading independent schools, spans ELC through to Year 12, with boarding, a large campus, and a huge co-curricular offering.
That scale is part of the appeal – but it also creates a specific kind of parent reality: lots of dates, lots of updates, lots of moving parts.
Westminster recognised the opportunity to communicate more effectively with their community, and reached out to us for the right support.
Too many channels, not enough clarity.
Westminster initially thought the issue was volume. Too many emails, too many texts, too scattered. But once we sat with the teams, then spoke directly with parents in focus groups, the problem became clear.
Although volume is an issue for any school, it wasn’t the sole reason for frustration or missed information. What parents expressed was confusion with the process.
Information was coming from too many places. Different staff, different formats, different apps, sometimes even paper – and parents were forced to do the stitching.
With Westminster’s co-curricular volume (200+ teams, multiple programs, overlapping schedules), the cost of that fragmentation compounds fast. Especially for families with more than one child.
Solution
Parent-tested and approved.
The solution was to build a centralised view of all communications. One that was designed around real parent behaviour and feedback. Mobile-first, calendar-led, and built to reduce the “where do I find that again?” problem.
Our work spanned across User Experience (UX) research and User Interface (UI) design. We kept returning to parents, not just once, but repeatedly. Instead of treating focus groups as a one-off validation moment, we used them as a continuous feedback loop: test, listen, refine, repeat. Evolving concepts were brought back to the same parent cohorts, to learn what mattered, what confused, and what simply didn’t match real family life – then adjusted accordingly.
That cycle shaped the solution. From the information hierarchy to the way cards were structured, filters were combined, and content was written for scanning and re-finding.
With all these insights, the idea became clear:
- Centralising comms
- A funnel point for school-wide communication – reducing the “where did they put that?” problem.
- Calendar-first hierarchy
- Early designs prioritised news and events, but parent feedback corrected the hierarchy quickly: the calendar was the priority, with news coming second.
- Low-fidelity wireframes → iterative playback
- We mapped structure, cards and data sources (calendar, news, events) in low-fi first, then refined through staff alignment and focus-group playback.
- Filters built for real family complexity
- Parents needed to combine information based on year level, activities, and commitments – not hunt across multiple feeds.
- Clearer patterns for scanning + re-finding
- Consistent structure, short blocks, and readability-first formatting. Because the value isn’t only in reading it once. It’s in finding it again when it matters.
“Too many” comms was never the problem for parents, it was about knowing where to find them.
“Outta Spatial are strategic, insightful, experienced and very easy to work with. Conversations and projects are meaningful and authentic and they genuinely have the best interests of the client in mind in every interaction.”
Outcomes
One dependable place to keep up.
The outcome was Westminster’s CommsHub.
Built for display inside SEQTA, an existing app within the Westminster community – not as a separate destination. If SEQTA was where most parents were already going, then it needed to feel like the place where important information lived. Constraint, in this case, became a strength – giving families one dependable place to plan, check, and catch up.
Parents could now prioritise what matters (starting with the calendar), filter to their world, and stop losing time searching across channels.
And because the work was shaped in collaboration with them throughout, the focus groups didn’t just validate the direction – they became champions for rollout.
Internally, the dashboard has encouraged more considered planning around what gets shared, when, and how often. With more thought now given to collating information and reducing frequency in communications to further improve the experience.
Since going live, feedback from parents has been overwhelmingly positive – not just on the refined SEQTA experience, but on the clearer rhythm of communication overall.
