Ontario Digital Services

Service Designer

The design digital lab is among the first of its kind for government. Located at the Waterloo Region-based innovation hub, @communitech. The Ontario Digital Service (ODS) lab focuses on making Ontarian's online experience of government services simpler, faster and better. It starts by conducting research to inform the design and delivery of online government products and service. A small team of experts in design thinking, citizen interaction design and user research plus co-ops will make  this interaction with their government through digital technologies easier.

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User Researcher

Transcribing, writing down pain points and interviewing users were all part of my job as User Researcher. We started off with hypothetical journeys to test our methods, but as the date for launching the lab drew closer we looked at more serious (confidential) issues in government. On the day of the launch we demonstrated on the Chief Digital Officer, Hilary Hartley, to the crowed of government officials and employees what a live User Research session entails. The demo was to help elaborate the purpose of the Lab. As my lab leader, Katherine Benjamin would explain "This means working with teams to understand the key problems that need to be solved before focusing on any sort of technical solution. Not all problems need a digital solution, but for those challenges that do need digital innovations, the Lab has the in-house expertise to take the outputs of user research sessions and turn them into prototypes than we can quickly validate with real users in the Lab."

Workshops

We organized many workshops for different groups and sectors in government. Some were held in the ODS lab itself, which is located in the Waterloo region of Ontario and others were located in downtown Toronto. The main purpose of the workshops is to teach government employees about agile methodology and what the lab can offer them. These workshops opened a line of communication between digital government and different public sectors that are asking to improve their services. My role was to facilitate, encourage discussion and lead the conversation. Interacting with different government employees gave me better incite on the kinds of struggles they are facing in their department. So when we went back to the drawing board we understood how to approach other departments to help solve their problems.

Prototyping

Prototyping was my favourite part of the internship. I was fortunate enough to be able to help in the different design toolkits that the ODS was working on. First toolkit I worked on was the Service Design Playbook . The playbook is designed to help product teams across the Ontario Government create better digital service that are focused on the need of users. It is designed to guide product teams through the stages of the digital design process and the activities that should be undertaken to meet the Digital Service Standard. Another thing I helped design was the Digital Service Standard, which is the minimum threshold that government employers must meet so that they can deliver consistently good service. Other prototyping projects I worked on independently were the DSS playcards, mood maps for user testing and a platform to combine the playbook and the DSS. The rest of the prototypes such as the method cards were also done by other co-ops, my role was simply to help test the cards on users.


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