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Many organizations and departments recognize the need to include user experience in their process. But in what capacity? And how? This can often manifest itself as simply hiring someone who acts as the team’s dedicated user experience designer. While this may be a good start, it misses the mark.

As you might have already read, CDS is working with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to make the process of rescheduling a citizenship appointment as convenient and stress-free as possible for applicants, while empowering office staff.

Most of the departments we work with are deploying new versions of their code quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. This fits well with the standard waterfall software development process, but it comes with some serious risks.

As our partnership with NRCan on the EnerGuide API winds down, the CDS product team held a retrospective to reflect on our experience, accomplishments and lessons learned.

In our experience, software development should be a team effort. This doesn’t mean multiple developers individually contributing code to a single code base; rather, the team as a whole is responsible for each line of code. For any production system, we have an expectation that all code will be approved by at least one other developer, before it is accepted.

This past fall, we brought on one of the first two cohorts of Code for Canada (C4C) fellows, the other joining our colleagues in the Government of Ontario. This post outlines how to make the most out of a potential partnership!

The goal of our partnership with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is to make the process of rescheduling a citizenship appointment as convenient and stress-free as possible for applicants, whilst empowering frontline staff.

We recently announced that Aaron Snow is joining CDS as our first CEO. I’m delighted that Aaron is taking the leap to move to Ottawa and be part of our digital movement.

On the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) application programming interface (API) product, we follow a common continuous integration (CI) process, including extensive use of automated testing. In our opinion, CI and automated testing is a fundamental requirement for producing and maintaining high-quality software products.

In September, Yaprak Baltacıoğlu, Secretary of the Treasury Board, launched the search for CDS’s first CEO. The global search attracted candidates from all over the world.

We are building a public-facing application programming interface (API) for Natural Resources Canada to open up access to EnerGuide Home Energy Ratings data. We talk about the details of this partnership in our post Conducting user research with NRCan to inform an API build - Part 1.

When Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) came to us with the idea of opening up access to EnerGuide data, the solution seemed pretty obvious — build an ‘Application Programming Interface’ (API) that would allow users to query the EnerGuide data; but first, we had to validate whether this proposed solution was the way to go.

Getting hands-on feedback from users is the best way to improve a digital product. All of the strategy meetings, planning, and requirements-gathering that are typical steps in developing software in government can’t compare to the experience of actually having people test what you build.

We recently received some feedback through our Github repository regarding the accessibility of the “hero” images we use on some pages of our website, including the blog posts.

There’s a lot of interest on how we are recruiting and staffing up a digital services team that can hit the ground running and help solve service challenges across the Government. This is why I am super excited to be writing a blog post about our hiring practices at CDS.

During our engagement sessions, people told us that the government needed to identify ways to enable non-traditional players to work with government and co-create solutions.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to participate in the Connected150 conference and spend some time with our colleagues in the Canadian Digital Service (CDS).

A few weeks ago, we opened our public recruitment campaign, looking for designers, developers, data scientists, product managers, and engagement experts. On the developer stream, a number of people have reached out to ask which technology platforms and programming languages we work in. It’s a great question! One of the exciting parts of joining CDS at such an early stage in our existence is that you’ll have a chance to shape how our technology choices...

It’s an exciting time at the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) as we start rolling up our sleeves and digging into our first service delivery projects, while we are working hard on choosing our next partnership opportunities. One of our partners in these early projects is Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Tomorrow, September 30, is International Translation Day. For me, talking about digital in French is a challenge: properly naming new technologies and especially - especially - not losing sight of the fact that we are addressing “real people”. Thinking of users first, making them central to our work - that also comes into play with the words that we choose.

After a short sabbatical and a decade in the U.K., I’m delighted to announce that I’m going to be the first Chief of Design with the Canadian Digital Service, a new initiative by the Government of Canada.

The services our government provides play an important role in the lives of millions of people.

I grew up on a farm. It was a childhood marked by the feeling of gravel beneath my feet, dirt on my hands, and the joy of picking produce right from the field. I wish I could tell you that picking projects is the same but I have yet to encounter gravel, dirt or produce during a partnership chat (bonus points if you make this happen!)

For months, I’ve been working behind the scenes to stand up the Canadian Digital Service. Through this process, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why Canada needs a digital service organization and the potential it has to change how we design government services.

The UK’s Government Digital Service has a brilliant list of ten design principles. I still remember the first time I saw it. “Start with user needs”, it read, “not government needs.” Oh my goodness, I thought: this is a real UK government website! That’s …amazing!

Putting users first. That’s what CDS is all about. When we talk about “digital government,” it often conjures up websites, APIs, and apps. They’re part of the toolkit. But digital government is about people: their needs, their experiences, their frustrations, even their hopes.

Canadians deserve government services that are easy to access and to use. They expect their government to be focused on service to citizens. In the connected world of the 21st century, good service means digital delivery, whether you are ordering take-out, rearranging your mortgage, managing your prescriptions – or accessing government programs and services.