Affordability Action Plan

Application, validation, payment distribution

client

Government of Alberta

Project type

Service design, product design

Project year

2023

The announcement

In response to the fast rise in inflation all across Canada, a government official made an announcement about a benefit to support citizens.

The benefit

Government agencies often need to think on their feet to respond to public frustrations. This time the announcement was made with a public promise of a launch date before the program was even planned out. This put forth an incredible challenge of a province wide delivery within 2,5 months. A special team was assembled to take on the task.

t - 2.5 months

11 ministries, 45 team members, 20 stakeholders

First, we needed to set the criteria for eligibility. This new initiative would need to cover all citizens who are already part of existing benefits, such as - disability, income support, senior, family and kinship programs. This is where 11 ministries came together.

The task at hand

We had to decide on eligibility parameters for the general public.

Which citizens were most vulnerable and what would they need to apply? A team of 3 Digital Architects, 4 Service Designers, 3 UX Designers, and developers was called together to tackle the big ask.

Authentication

This project took citizens through the entire process from evaluating eligibility, to the application process, to finally payout. Part of citizen authentication required using a government issued ID system in order to authenticate each person and make sure duplicates were managed.

Consecutive payments

Connected directly into payment rails with Canada's largest banks in order to pay each eligible person on a monthly basis. Made a list of outlier cases such as - when a person ages in or out of eligibility, whether a new eligibility status was met during the program.

Added an internal version of the product in order to service manually past the program's official timeline.

what actually happened

Process and takeaways

AEM markets themselves as an out-of-box, ready for use site builder. The reality is that it has many limitations to it's interface that stand in the way of a proper build.

Working closely with strategy and development, we had to compromise a lot without sacrificing the fidelity. The stakes were high during this project as it was meant to pave the way to this service being the main selling point of work with ICF.

challenges

The way component variant menus are defined in the system makes it hard to create custom variations for brand assets.

ICF is a large organization and it's production department was separate from digital. Ultimately, I got assigned a Jr. Graphic designer to work under me. Her work mostly touched banners, so I had to coach her on designing for digital products. It took some time, but luckily she was very intuitive.

Migrating a massive unorganized list of existing blog posts, legal documents, insurance plan breakdowns from Wordpress was a challenge. Because those items would come in various formats, I had to think of ways to best design their final destination on the new site.

In conclusion

I loved being part of a project that allowed all disciplines to inform the final scope and delivery. Playing a big part in editing the SOW has given me a better understanding of planning and budgets.

It was also the first time I worked on building out a reusable template and educating clients on how to use it for handoff.

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