How HumanAbility built a document system that works across an entire organisation

HumanAbility had identified the need for a more consistent, accessible and technically robust Word template system. As the organisation grew, it became increasingly important to have templates that supported brand consistency, accessibility and usability for staff across different teams.

As the Jobs and Skills Council working across aged care and disability services, children’s education and care, health, human services, and sport and recreation, HumanAbility produces a wide range of formal documentation. These documents need to be both on brand and practical for staff to use independently.

HumanAbility approached Timplates because Word template development is a specialised discipline, and the organisation wanted to create a technically sound template system from the outset.

The situation before the project

At the time, HumanAbility was building documents using a mix of legacy templates and ad hoc formatting. Different documents followed different conventions, spacing was inconsistent and accessibility was not always built in. As the organisation continued to grow, there was also a risk of increased rework and troubleshooting.

The issue with ad hoc formatting is not just that documents can look inconsistent. It is that there is no shared foundation underneath them. Every new document requires someone to make the same formatting decisions again, and without a shared system, those decisions can start to diverge.

HumanAbility identified that need and wanted to create a stronger foundation for future documents.

How the build was approached

The work began with a core set of priority templates for the Projects team. This allowed HumanAbility and Timplates to get one set of documents working properly, learn from that process, and then use it as the foundation for the templates that followed.

From there, the suite expanded across other teams and document types. The heading styles, spacing rules, accessibility standards and brand alignment built into the initial templates became the baseline for every document that followed.

What the build required

HumanAbility needed templates that were technically robust, visually on brand and accessible to staff who are not designers. Those three things are harder to reconcile than they may appear.

Accessibility in a Word template means more than making sure the colours pass a contrast check. It means setting the correct heading order so screen readers can navigate the document. It means using paragraph styles that apply consistently, rather than direct formatting that can break when someone copies text from another source. It also means building spacing rules that hold across different machines and versions of Office.

Brand alignment means those same styles also need to look like HumanAbility. The colour palette, font choices and the way headings sit on the page all need to be embedded in the template, rather than left to the person filling it in.

Usability means a staff member with no document design knowledge should be able to open the template and produce something that looks right, without needing to make formatting decisions.

What changed

The templates are now in active use across the organisation. Staff across different teams are producing documents from the same foundation, which supports greater consistency and reduces the rework that can come with ad hoc formatting.

HumanAbility described the experience as positive, noting that the team was impressed by the technical quality of the work and by how easy Timplates was to work with. The team was responsive, solution focused and supportive throughout the process, particularly when timelines were tight.

If your organisation is producing documents from a mix of old templates and improvised formatting, and you can see the point where that's going to become a problem, it's worth talking to us before it gets there. Click here to book a time with Tim to discuss your project.