Helping people plan their next step

Tahatū Career Navigator is New Zealand’s new careers planning website, replacing the long-running careers.govt.nz site. Tahatū is designed to help all New Zealanders — students, people returning to the workforce, or anyone considering a career change — find their next steps and make informed study, training and career decisions.

Tahatū shifts how we think about careers in Aotearoa, moving from the idea of climbing a single job ladder to recognising that skills can be applied in many ways throughout life. It supports people to understand their interests, values and strengths — and how these can match with study, training and career choices.

A collaborative effort of technology, te ao Māori design, and data science

Springload Te Pipītanga partnered with the Tertiary Education Commission, Indigenous Design & Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA), and data science consultancy Nicholson Consulting to design and build this new platform. The multicultural team of 48 brought together experience and content design, te ao Māori design, development, DevOps, testing and data science.

The team worked as equal partners from the outset. A mihi whakatau and whakawhanaungatanga welcomed every team member and set the tone for a strong, collaborative culture. We defined roles and responsibilities early and agreed on a team charter to guide how we worked together.

Following a te ao Māori framework

Māori and Pasifika were Tahatū’s primary audience, so cultural affirmation and equity were central. The team developed a te ao Māori framework, carried out extensive UX research, and held play-based workshops where young people created their own vision for the future.

Tahatū now embodies these principles. It provides clear, inclusive language in both English and te reo Māori, supports screen readers and keyboard navigation, and follows best practice for accessible, user-friendly experiences.

Building a smarter, bilingual search

People describe occupations in many different ways. To help them find what they’re looking for, the team created an evaluation framework for Search, iterating on algorithms to balance diverse needs. Tahatū’s Search works in both English and te reo Māori. Supporting te reo Māori meant developing functionality to recognise and match different word forms from scratch.

Designing Tahatū through a Māori worldview

The Tahatū design direction was anchored in te ao Māori from its conception, with the narrative, naming, and visual identity established by IDEA and Dr. Johnson Witehira. Their work centred on the concept of navigating toward the horizon—a metaphor for lifelong career growth, reflection, and adaptation. This horizon became both a visual and conceptual motif, shaping how users move through the experience: steady, purposeful, and open-ended.

Grounding the project in Māori design thinking ensured that every creative decision was connected to meaning and whakapapa. The narrative encouraged users to see career development not as a fixed endpoint but as an ongoing journey of learning and discovery. These principles informed the tone, language, and pacing of the experience, as well as how identity and connection were expressed through visual form and interaction.

Translating cultural narrative into a contemporary user interface

After the initial creative direction was established, Springload’s design team translated that foundation into a living digital experience. The interface balanced clarity and depth, using spacious layouts, gentle gradients, and horizon lines to evoke forward motion and a sense of light emerging from possibility. Subtle references to natural forms—through curves, layering, and movement—gave the design a feeling of life and rhythm grounded in the natural world.

Typography and colour were chosen to feel grounded and warm, with an emphasis on accessibility and calm guidance rather than urgency or instruction. This careful integration of narrative and design meant that every visual decision pointed back to the kaupapa. The result is a UI that feels both contemporary and culturally resonant—inviting users to orient themselves, reflect, and move forward along their own tahatū (horizon). Consistent with te ao Māori principles, the work foregrounds collective authorship and respect for origins, ensuring that the project’s foundations remain visible within its final digital form.

From paper to spreadsheet to content management system

We worked directly with the Tertiary Education Commission content team, who maintain a database of occupations in Aotearoa. We created a series of lean, iterative prototypes to progressively understand and improve their business processes.

We started with paper prototypes, where we drew out flows and wireframes for how they used the existing occupations database. We then moved to a spreadsheet with the same functionality as the tool we were planning to build. We iterated and revised the spreadsheet structure until it worked optimally for the team.

From there, we began extracting out sections of the spreadsheet and migrating them to a Wagtail content management system (CMS).

The right testing means building the right solution

The advantage of using this lean iterative approach was that we only built what was required at each point for testing. We didn’t invest in building a technical solution before we understood how it needed to function. By the time we migrated the sections of the spreadsheet to the CMS, we had much more information about how the tool should work, and built the right solution.

We were able to make significant improvements to the team’s processes through our prototyping — abstracting out concepts so they could be managed separately, didn’t need to be rewritten in multiple places every time an update was required.

Getting inspired and underway

Tahatū now features over 800 career ideas, nearly 100 school subjects and more than 4000 tertiary qualifications in one place. It offers interactive tools to help people explore their interests and match them with study, training and work options at any stage of life.

A successful pilot in schools, and now available to all

Tahatū is already helping students navigate their careers, and dream of where their unique skills and interests could take them. Its pilot in schools across the motu was hugely successful, with students especially loving the ‘Get inspired’ section, and the self-discovery resources such as the quiz, values and skills worksheets, and guide pages.