After being given our project brief we had split the class up into three groups to focus on three different aspects of the project. We were brought in to make the city of Edmonton’s leisure access programs (LAP) application process more efficient. We had one group working on a pre-eligibility forms before the application process starts which includes the wireframes for that process. Another group making journey maps and user personas to give to the client, and having a section of the user journey to wireframe. Then my group that worked on a service blueprint and wireframes in a different section of the users journey.

My group and I fist started this project by making a research plan. We decided that the best way to understand the problems our client was facing was to interview some of the staff to here their side of what they think wasn’t working right. We also wanted to do a comparative analysis to other major cities application portals, and as well as different application portals for different companies like colleges and the government of Canada. A task flow was also needed for us to understand the process from both the residents and employee side. With all that work needing to be done we broke our group into pairs that each focused on a different research need.

The whole group had a part in creating questions for the employees, then the pair who were focusing on the interviews took over and fine tuned the questions. We were given a short time to ask these questions, the staff were very busy due to their inefficient way of processing applications. The answers they gave us helped us understand the employee side of the system.

To get a better understanding of online application processes we looked at four other application systems including Humber Polytechnic’s student admission applications, City of Calgary’s fair entry program, Government of Canada’s Ranking tool, and the Metrolinx fare payment system. After looking and comparing all these systems to the city of Edmontons system at the time we could see the differences and the areas that could be changed.

A big issue that we already knew of was that they do not have a good online application process, leading to workers manually reviewing forms and applicants mailing in their documents (sometimes the wrong ones) which cause their acceptance to take longer and workers to have a large backlog of applications to review. That is why they wanted to bring us in to help them create a better application process.

As a class we brought all of our different works together to create one final product to show to the client. My team took charge on making everything look cohesive between all the different groups. We had made high-fidelity wireframes of the LAP information page, pre-eligibility checker, application tracking portal, and an information page for after being accepted showing the benefits users are entitled to.

To wrap up the project we had to present our process work and the final product to our clients, which consisted of managers, team leads, and other staff joining to see the work we had done. They were thankful at the end and were very happy with the solution we had given them. We had been given an update later that year by our professor who had organized this project saying that they had given our work to their tech departments and were going to implement some of the solutions we had given them.