Ontario Public Service

Co-operative Work Experience as a Digital Information Assistant at OPS

background

During the summer and fall (June to December) of 2019, I had the amazing opportunity of completing my co-operative work placement with the Ontario Public Service (OPS), at the Ontario Ministry of Labour, Training, and Skills Development (formerly, the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities.)

I was a Digital Information Assistant with the Digital Transformation and Web Services team, an interdisciplinary team in the Employment and Training Division (ETD), consisting of user experience designers, web developers, site administrators, and a team leader. By managing and enhancing multiple Employment Ontario (EO) sites and systems, our team supported the ETD staff and service delivery managers to provide programs and services related to the training and skills development of the Ontarian workforce.

My responsibilities in the team focussed broadly on three aspects; primarily user experience research and design, but also, content management and site administration, and evaluation for accessibility compliance. This allowed me to frequently work very closely with multiple stakeholders such as issues coordinators, business analysts, policy advisors, ETD staff and colleagues from other divisions in the Ontario Public Service.

Throughout my co-op placement, I was consciously working on my professional development, by enhancing my technical and soft skills and aiming to achieve goals documented in a learning agenda.

what i worked on

While I cannot share the details of my projects due to an NDA, here’s a brief summary of the great stuff I worked on during my time at OPS.

a. streamlining the communications flow

On a daily basis, site administrators in my team receive several online documents from Employment and Training Division staff, that need to be organised based on various criteria and displayed on a website. Although a specific process for the manual classification of these documents existed, it was very cumbersome and difficult to remember, causing overall complexity and inconsistency.

After mapping out the existing communications flow and conducting contextual inquiry to understand the current process, I organised a co-design session with participants from multiple teams to recognise the different points of interaction and come up with a solution that works for everyone. This resulted in a process change and user interface redesign that simplified the entire communications flow and ensured consistency while organising and displaying the documents, by leveraging existing functionality on the backend.

b. exploration of access control

Working in an interdisciplinary team, there was a need to minimise complications and accidents by controlling access to processes and files that were unrelated to a person’s job responsibilities. I was tasked with investigating how this access control could be implemented, taking into account the current practices within the team and our interaction with other teams. I also explored the short-term implications of assigning user roles and the potential inter-departmental process changes that could be implemented in the long run to optimise the entire workflow.

c. improving information architecture

Employment Ontario staff found it difficult to find and navigate between various internal sites that they need to use regularly. They complained of inconsistency in the menu and excess information, which lead to unnecessary time spent searching for relevant details.

In response to this, I conducted an open card sort coupled with a survey, to understand how to organise the website content better. I assessed technical feasibility and analysed data from Google Analytics and informal interviews, based on which I was able to cull dead links, redundant information and details of discontinued programs, reorganise the menu and footer, and improve the information architecture of the website.

d. remediation for accessibility

I learned how to evaluate websites and documents for accessibility and use screen readers (JAWS and NVDA). With this knowledge, I remediated over 100 documents in different formats (pdf, word, ppt, websites) to be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). As a newcomer, I assessed and provided feedback on templates and created checklists to teach other teams how to evaluate and remediate documents. Additionally, I explored the connection between different methods of coding and screen reader speech.

e. other stuff

Working as a designer in an interdisciplinary team using agile methods, taught me a great deal about collaboration with different types of roles and the challenges involved. I regularly suggested changes in our team processes and working methods, to enable us to work better in our specific circumstances.
I supported the creation of a design system to ensure consistency among a group of internal websites that our team managed.
I constantly searched for and reported design, functional and accessibility issues that were required to be fixed on our websites, and tested for quality assurance (QA) within the features implemented by the developers on the team.

what my day was like

While each day was essentially different, presenting to me new and exciting challenges, here are some aspects of my usual day and what I learned from them…

a. huddle up!

Our team followed the scrum framework and began every morning with a huddle to discuss what we had worked on the previous day, what we would be working on that day and whether we saw any barriers that might prevent us from progressing. Since our team managed multiple sites and systems, we had two large whiteboards that helped us keep track of our tasks.

The Sprint Board displayed various tickets (sticky notes) that we were working on during the current two-week sprint. These were usually continuous improvement tasks or bug fixes on existing sites. On the other hand, the Ongoing Work board helped us keep track of tasks that required approvals from or communication with other teams, and work that had lower priority. Each ticket was assigned to one or more members of the team, indicated by the colour-coded flags.

Being a more visual person, I found this method of tracking my work very useful as, not only could I see all my immediate tasks in front of me, but it also allowed me to break up bigger jobs into smaller chunks so that I could work on them more efficiently.

With both whiteboards side-by-side, I compared the work completed on each of them and realised that the two-week deadline on the Sprint board (along with a few other factors) pushed our team to accomplish tasks much faster than the board without the deadlines, which essentially acts just like a to-do list. Based on what I saw, I learned to assign tentative deadlines to my tasks in other projects as well, so that I could proceed toward my goals in a more systematic manner.

b. but first, coffee!

With over 60,000 public servants in the OPS, even just the branches in various divisions of the ministry are usually too big to fit on a single floor of the building. At the time, our branch, Organisational and Business Excellence Branch (OBEB), was spread across three floors.

Immediately after the huddle, some of my team members and I would usually take a short walk outside to get coffee and interact with our colleagues on other floors. These short informal conversations taught me a lot about how other divisions of the ministry function and also about the various backgrounds and cultures that my colleagues come from. I found their differences and similarities to my own fascinating.

This interaction with my colleagues also helped me increase professional connections and expand my network. I often heard about the latest trends, and interesting events and conferences related to user experience/product design from my colleagues. Through them, I also found out about various OPS-wide Yammer groups that often discuss topics such as service design, policy innovation, design thinking, user research and even effective communication and growth mindset.

c. meetings, meetings and more meetings

Collaboration is highly valued at OPS and the majority of decisions in my team were made together, allowing for discourse and the involvement of diverse opinions and multiple perspectives.

Our team generally spent a considerable amount of time in this meeting room, whether it be during sprint planning meetings, sprint review meetings or team discussions and presentations. The sprint review meeting also allowed us to reflect on our work so far and discuss lessons learned and improvements that we could implement in the future.

One time, I gave three presentations in a single sprint to explain my work on different projects to the rest of my team, which allowed us to make informed decisions that impacted our systems and workflow. These frequent presentations and the regular feedback that I received made me more confident about simplifying complex problems and presenting my ideas clearly.

Our team regularly attended the Director’s meetings, which placed us in the larger organisation and discussed the launch and implementation of new programs or major changes in the current ones that might impact our work.

d. accessibility

One of the most exciting things about working in OPS was how much I was able to learn about accessibility.

I realised the importance of accessibility accommodation and how much of an impact it has on the lives of those who require it. Not only did I learn to design for accessibility compliance, but also studied the laws and regulations that have been put into place by the government for a more accessible future.

Accessibility compliance is a part of every public servant’s training and includes not just digital accessibility, but contains modules for customer service, information and communications, employment, design of public spaces, and general requirements. Taking my training one step further, I learned to use screen readers and create accessible artefacts, which allowed me to evaluate and remediate over 100 documents for the systems that our team worked on during my time there.

With a great emphasis on accessibility organisation-wide, OPS regularly organises multiple events to enable us to improve our knowledge in this domain. I had the opportunity to attend the Digital Accessibility Forum 2020 and engage in topics around digital accessibility in video production, social media and document and web testing tools. I also participated in knowledge-sharing sessions, where I got to present and discuss my insights from the forum.

e. design process

Analysing sticky notes from a co-design session

Since my team did not have a standard design process that was required to be followed, I had the freedom to, very carefully and consciously, pick which research and design methods made the most sense for the problem at hand and create a unique UX plan for each project that I worked on. Knowing which method to use in what situation is a very important skill for any good Experience/Product designer and this process allowed me to understand, first-hand, the advantages and drawbacks of the different methods that one could use. This also gave me a chance to tweak and transform various techniques to fit our specific requirements, all the while situating the project in the larger context of the organisation.

This experience shifted my mindset from thinking about how to solve a problem, to first, analysing the problem in its entirety; a change in focus, from product to process. Instead of thinking of how to improve a design, I started to focus on how the users interact with the product or system and what would enhance that interaction. While this could be a design change, I found that it could also involve adjusting the artefact or even reworking the process or workflow.

f. commute home

Finally, at the end of my workday, while heading home, I typically spent around 30 minutes commuting, either by public transit or walking. I wanted to make this time more productive and decided to follow through with my goal of reading more books.

This led to me reading whenever I took public transit. Since it is not recommended to read while walking, I generally listened to podcasts whenever I walked. Some of the podcasts that I listened to included 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, IDEO Futures, Experience Design with Tony Daussat, TED Talks Daily, The Mindset Mentor with Rob Dial, and at times, Criminal.

sharing my co-op experience

I had the chance to talk about my co-op work experience during the University of Toronto iSchool Co-op Showcase, which was well attended by students, faculty and industry professionals.

My co-op poster helped draw people in to learn more about my experience and supported our conversation. While designing the poster, I used a minimalistic aesthetic and made sure to keep the audience in mind, showing what most students applying for co-op positions in the future would be interested in knowing.

The showcase was a great way to end my co-op, as it allowed me to reflect on my entire experience and share it with others.

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