SeeMePlease founder and chief executive Katie McDermott has a simple proposition: if you design for the edge cases then everyone benefits.
Her company’s user testing platform brings in perspectives that are often left out of the digital design process – people who are blind, deaf, neurodivergent, older than 70, or navigating English as a second language.
“Instead of parking those edge cases … if you prioritise those insights, you’ve designed for everyone,” Ms McDermott told InnovationAus on the Commercial Disco podcast.
The idea was born out of her years as chief digital officer at Service NSW, where she was responsible for design, engineering and product across some 1,500 state government services.
Ms McDermott recalls the frustration of not being able to understand why some digital services were quickly adopted but others languished with low uptake, forcing citizens back into more expensive face-to-face channels.
“You get analytics or abandonment rates, but no one can tell you who’s being impacted and why,” she said.
“I really valued direct customer feedback and agitated for that with my teams. But it was clunky, slow, impossible to get from those diverse perspectives. That’s where the idea was born.”
Her time with the blind community was particularly formative. “I honestly assumed that people who are blind would prefer to go into a service centre. I had no idea what a screen reader was or how empowering it can be for them to manage their own life admin online,” Ms McDermott said.
That lack of awareness is widespread across both the public and private sectors, she says. Organisations may not deliberately exclude users, but they rely heavily on technical conformance reports that fail to capture real-world friction.
SeeMePlease, which is a finalist in this year’s InnovationAus Awards for Excellence, has now secured support through the federal government’s Industry Growth Program, which Ms McDermott believes makes it one of the few – if not the only – sole female-founded companies to win backing.
The grant is accelerating the company’s entry into the UK and US markets and supporting work with the University of Sydney on new multimodal AI sentiment analysis technology.
The aim is to blend screen recordings, survey data and video feedback to generate richer insights. “What you find is people sometimes put their feedback through rosy glasses because they’re so delighted to be listened to. But if you watch them at the same time, they’re clicking 50 times trying to get through a button that’s not labelled,” Ms McDermott said.
“That feature will help get a much more efficient understanding of sentiment.”
The support comes at a pivotal moment, with Ms McDermott juggling an international expansion and the impending arrival of her fourth child.
But scaling SeeMePlease is only part of her focus. She is outspoken about the barriers smaller firms face when selling into government – procurement processes she describes as “really, really challenging”.
“I hated procurement when I worked within government, let alone being on the outside trying to engage with government. Anyone that is a founder or works for an SME would struggle to get cut-through selling their product,” she said.
Ms McDermott has some practical suggestions. She wants senior executives recognised and rewarded for engaging with Australian startups, and she wants agencies to commit time to hearing pitches.
“For every event that the public service goes to where Microsoft or Google is sitting next to them, carve out an hour to talk to a startup,” she said. “Even if you’re not going to procure their service, give them the time, listen to their value pitch, give them feedback.”
She points to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations as a positive example. “They’ve been a tremendous partner of ours. We haven’t always delivered the best features, but they’ve helped us improve our service offering. More than that, they just gave us a go.”
For Ms McDermott, cultural change is the missing piece. “You can talk about sovereign tech and backing startups and innovation, but it takes more than a slogan,” she said. “It would make a huge difference if people were applauded when they reach out and give an early-stage Australian startup a go.”
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