Hello! You haven’t heard from us in a while because we’ve been focused on publishing our first official Code for Canada blog, were at our first Code for Canada Fellow retreat, and have been absolutely drowning in data. But these are all good things!

Code for Canada Fellows goofing around at our first retreat. 

We wanted to give a quick check-in on where we are with our discovery research and data analysis, so you know why we’ve been quiet.

During the UX research phase, we completed:

More than 30 hours of interviews, including with past, current and potential applicants, staff, and stakeholders

Two design probes breaking down the Letter of Intent template

Analysis of the contents of the PSD inbox, which is often the first point of contact for applicants interested in the program

Observational studies of PHAC processes and ways of interacting with applicants

Slide from our most recent Project Panel presentation, where we gave an update about our work, including our UX research process.

As you can see from the walls in our office (and even the filing cabinet), where more than 500 are posted, this has given us at least a thousand data points! We’ve been working hard on collating, synthesizing, and analyzing that data. My dog, Boris, helped.

My sweet dorkie (no, actually, that’s his breed) dog dorking out with us during data synthesis.

Rose working on analyzing our data points, which have spilled over from the walls to the tables and filing cabinets. Oof.

In the next week or two, we’ll be delivering an insights report that identifies key areas of opportunity to streamline the MSP program’s application process for users, as well as make it more accessible to the types of innovative organizations across the country that it intends to serve.

We hosted our first office hours!

We had three goals:

To show some of our recent work [designing a prototype + testing the prototype], and get feedback.

To meet public servants championing similar innovation projects, and to spark conversations across teams and departments.

To share our experience with user research, and learn from the experience of others (something we’re deep in the weeds with right now).

(above) Office hours attendees discussing user research methods. At the downtown Ottawa GC coworking space.

Andrea facilitated a session to debunk some of the misconceptions about user research terminology. Sometimes, we throw around “user research” and “user testing” – but do those umbrella terms mean the same to each of us? How do our experiences using different methods differ?

We broke out into pairs or trios, and picked 2–3 different user research/testing methods to discuss; our experience with them, and if we didn’t have personal experience, what questions we had about them. Then, we came together as a group to share back.

(above) Andrea, UX Design Fellow, facilitating an activity about user research methods.

(above) Myself and Ali, #NextGenTravel team member and #GCAgent, discussing user research and testing methods we’ve had experience with in the past: eye tracking, diary studies, and usability testing.

(above) Notes from our activity.

As a group, we had experience with, or questions about, the following (from more generative to more evaluative methods):

Diary studies – useful to observe change over time

Workshops – used when you have no idea or hypotheses, what do you focus on?

Behavioural studies

Focus interviews

Hypothesis testing via different methods

Card sorting – helpful to map a process

Participatory design – involve users throughout the process

Co-design – focus on bringing users into the process instead of bringing the product to them

Usability testing – can users accomplish the task you want them to, where do they struggle?

Eye-tracking – useful to inform design decisions about where to order content, language, information hierarchy

Clickstream analysis – used to observe online interactions

This list isn’t near exhaustive, but was a great start to spark conversation – diary studies for drug testing, behavioural studies to test tobacco packaging, using co-design to bring users into the process and build a better, stronger product or service, etc.

Thanks to everyone that attended! We look forward to hosting a second office hours soon, sharing more work, and engaging in more discussions. Stay tuned on our blog for more until then.

– Maddy, Product Manager Fellow

This week we kicked off our first official sprint of the fellowship. We’re officially  still in discovery, but we wanted to get adopt some of the agile ceremonies and get used to this way of working. 

That means:

daily standups (in-person and also documented via DailyBot in slack)

a trello board to track our in-progress work and backlog

bi-weekly sprint planning

bi-weekly demos

bi-weekly retrospectives

Our fellowship is of fixed duration, so we want to be sure we’re making progress, and also can ‘show our work’ in getting there. 

We’re also investigating other ways to work with others across the government, and involve them along the way, though lunch and learns and a wiki to share and explain the specific activities we’re engaging in, and their outcomes. 

A few highlights from the week:

We had the chance to meet Tammy Labelle, the CIO of the Digital Services Branch of Public Services and Procurement Canada. It was an honour that she made the time for us, and we were able to ask her directly some of our questions about our project. Once again, it reinforced the significance of this project! (It also garnered us each some new twitter followers!)

As I mentioned in last week’s blog post, the NextGEN Travel team had conducted a lot of research before we arrived, including creating journey maps of the travel experience from the perspective of travelers, travel support, approvers and financial support. This week I started to break that out a bit more, and created some ‘existing process’ maps for 7 discrete jobs. These are still in progress, but they are helping us establish a shared vocabulary for what aspect of the travel journey we’re focusing on. 

Job 1: Create Travel Request (Traveller / Travel Support)

Job 2: Approve Travel Request (Approver)

Job 3: Book Travel (Traveller / Travel Support)

Job 4: Travel (Traveller)

Job 5: Create Expense Report (Traveller / Travel Support)

Job 6: Approve Expense Report (Approver)

Job 7: Process Expense Report (Financial Support)

The next step is to layer on relevant policies and observations, and then identify unknowns, assumptions and/or opportunities.

The last highlight of my week was spending time with the NextGEN Travel Research Manager. We’ll be working together to navigate the nuances of design research vs public opinion research and implement mixed methods research to give us both quantitative and qualitative data to support our recommendations for the new travel system.