What were we building?
Imagine for a moment a small mom n' pop shop with five employees. The Mom n' Pop isn't too sure of the Ontario employee regulations and policies, so for the past four statutory holidays, they have not paid their employees overtime pay.
This is bad.
The Ministry of Labour has "Officers" which investigate companies all around Ontario to ensure they're abiding by the rules and regulations set out by the Ontario government.
Sometimes the Ontario Officers request that a company complete a "Self Audit" to get the company to review their own records and get themselves up to compliance standards.
The "Self Audit" was done manually by companies (it's completed in Excel, other tools, paper, or even on the back of napkins!).
We were setting out to digitize the Self Audit. The tool:
-
Allow Officers to request an Employer completes a Self Audit through our tool
-
Allow employers to enter data
-
Automatically work out whether the employer is abiding to standards.
Goals
Why?
We did the "Goals" exercise as early as possible during a project. By sharing collective goals between the Stakeholders and Team, we can learn early on which goals are priority.
Goals help the team decide where to focus their time and efforts.
Exercise Outcome: Gain a shared understanding of all our high-level goals, and to discover competing priorities.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Risks & Mitigations
To gain a shared understanding of potential risks that will block us from achieving our goals.
We did this exercise to create a forum where people feel comfortable sharing fears and concerns, and in order to proactively mitigate issues we think may arise. This session results in a list of prioritized action items that the team can use to get ahead of any risks.
Personas
The software for the Ministry of Labour have two users:
-
An Employment Standards Officer (from the Ministry of Labour)
-
An Ontario Employer
.jpg)
Value Proposition
Why are we building this software? It's important to know the value of our product. Will it improve a situation, will it help the user make progress on something? The next exercise sets out to understand this new software's value proposition.
​
What is this activity?
This starts as a sketching activity for the team to generate moments of delight or need to build empathy. Then it turns into a writing activity where we talk about the highest value this product might deliver for a user.
.jpg)
Service Blueprint Workshop
What it is
A service Blueprint is a diagramming tool that communicates a complex flow. It is especially helpful for multiple interactions to spread over time.
​
How we did it
The team spent the afternoon understanding all the steps that it takes to conduct a self audit, from the perspective of the Employment Standards Officer, as well as the Employer being audited. We mapped out the current experience for a self audit in yellow post-it notes and then layered on the future, digital experience, in purple post-its.
​
Why we did it
We conducted the exercise with the whole team, with our Product Owner Steven contributing most of the knowledge of how it works. This process allowed there to be a large and efficient transfer of knowledge from the PO to the rest of the team. We all walked away with a shared understanding of the complexities of the audit process and now have a document to reference.
.jpg)
Topic Maps
We wanted to avoid listing out our interview questions line by line. That would make it seem more as a questionnaire or evaluation as opposed to a casual conversation. It would also be more difficult to follow up on a previous question/answer when given a strict list of questions to go through.
Instead, the questions are organized into an affinity map. The main topics appear in clouds, with keywords/phrases branching out of it. That way topics can be seen from a glance and covered talking points are more easily spotted. The results are shown below. This will be our reference guide for the problem-solving interviews.
​
Our final topic map for interviews:
Synthesizing Our Interviews
We completed six exploratory interviews with Officers from all around Ontario.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Sketching Workshop
The goal is to help draw some basic wireframes first to express the ideas we have in our heads. The entire team takes part in this, not just a designer, to help better align our ideas beforehand. This could help avoid investing considerable time to make digital wireframes to only be scrapped afterward.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Some High Fidelity Mocks & Final Design
