Overview
Hear Me Out is a free conversational tool built with the National Justice Project to help people navigate Australia's complex complaint system. We explored whether generative AI could let someone explain what happened in their own words and receive specific, trustworthy guidance about where to go next.
I led the frontend build, working closely with design and AI engineering to turn the recommendation system into a clear, trustworthy conversational experience.
The product launched publicly in 2024 and has since won Australian Good Design and Web Awards.
Making recommendations we could trust
The first part of the project was building the engine. The system needed to understand the messy, personal way someone might describe what had happened to them, then present back reliable, factual information.
To establish a baseline, we started testing general-purpose models to see how reliable they were for our use case. This exposed problems very quickly - the models produced convincing answers, but relied on incomplete or outdated knowledge, missed details specific to Australian complaint systems and tended to give one confident answer where several pathways could be valid.
The resulting approach used a custom retrieval mechanism (RAG) grounded in a library of trusted factsheets developed by the National Justice Project. Each factsheet describes one complaint body, giving the system a consistent, verified knowledge base from which to assess someone's situation and recommend appropriate next steps.
Testing ran alongside development throughout the project. The team created a large suite of expert-reviewed scenarios covering everything from straightforward complaints to incidents spanning several jurisdictions. This allowed changes to the AI system to be evaluated against known expected outcomes rather than relying on whether individual responses simply sounded convincing.
Designing the experience
A reliable recommendation alone wasn't enough. People needed to feel confident and secure using the system. Users were inputting private, personal and often difficult information, so trust and confidence were paramount.
We designed the conversation to mirror the way someone naturally explains a problem. The assistant lets people describe what happened in their own words before asking targeted follow-up questions. This keeps the interaction conversational while gathering the structured information needed to produce reliable recommendations.
I focused on making the experience feel robust and reliable. Streaming responses, clear conversational state and thoughtful transition timing helped the assistant feel responsive, while progressive disclosure prevented users from being overwhelmed with legal information before it was relevant. The interactions were designed to reinforce that the assistant was carefully working through the situation rather than producing an instant, generic answer.
People describe their experience in their own words.
Outcome
Hear Me Out launched publicly in October 2024 as a free tool from the National Justice Project, helping people navigate Australian complaint pathways through conversational AI. From then it has kept expanding; it now covers Victorian and federal complaint pathways alongside the original New South Wales content, and includes an AI-assisted tool for drafting complaints in plain language.
In 2025 it won an Australian Good Design Award for Excellence in Concept Design, and was named Most Innovative Website at the Australian Web Awards.