During the review process, I learned that over 30 ministries within the Ontario Government accessed the platform, each with specific needs and some with custom processes. Throughout the redesign, we would meet with multiple stakeholders from different ministries to review streamlined UX process proposals.

Given the 10 years since the product's launch, some early persona work, video interviews, and basic Balsamiq workshops had been conducted to improve the user experience, but there was no UX leadership to drive action. When I joined, I reviewed all existing materials and continued the investigative process to identify fundamental pain points and guide future improvements.

Building upon the existing structure and foundational aspects of the Personas, we mapped out the various sections (existing and new) and user roles/permissions, including a problem > solution approach to guide our uplift goals.

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Sectional mapping and access permissions based on user roles.

We hosted many design workshops throughout the process, reviewing A/B concepts, organizational mapping, styles, and more, while creating interactive low- and high-fidelity prototypes for user testing using Sketch and InVision.

One key aspect of the design was maintaining a desktop-only focus for this build, allowing us to stay focused on rapid development and deployment, with mobile-first being a future consideration.

In addition to engaging stakeholders, I also collaborated with UX counterparts from the Ontario Digital Service, who were responsible for redesigning the Ontario.ca website and design standards. My primary concern was the branding of each ministry and its potential impact on my work on the OnRequest design.

Given my extensive branding background, I was invited to contribute to both the renaming (from SODO) and the final brand look and feel. This naturally extended from the Design System work. We held several internal workshops for the naming process and the subsequent rebrand.

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Every feature was carefully planned and discussed with stakeholders and engineers. Here are some early mock-ups of the Form Builder and its functional design.

We discussed the sectional hierarchy of all products and services, starting with the original design and refining it to highlight the top sections most used by all Ministries. Once finalized, we added a smaller subset, complete with custom iconography, to the homepage, while still allowing users to click through to access the full searchable set of categories.

Approval process is exclusive to Managers. This is end-user view.

Every request made had to route itself to a Manager in a particular Ministry for approval, which could also include different billing processes, limits, and other particulars. To the end-user, or “requestor”, they could continually see their latest requests on the home screen and get a quick indication as to the request status.

The design of ‘Take a Tour’ of the new OnRequest we broken down into 8 key screens, and various pages and processes were simplified for the previews.

Here we can see a “My Requests” historical table, breaking down what was requested, who the recipient (Manger/approver) is, the date created, estimated completion date, and latest status. Additionally, one could filter by all status types.

OnRequest launched successfully and received praise from several ministries as a critical step in modernizing a key service.

Several years later, I was recalled to participate in planning and designing OnRequest "Phase 2," which focused on adopting mobile-first principles and implementing additional UI and UX improvements that were not achievable in the first phase.

Don’t forget to check out screens from “Phase 2” on GrantUX.com >