Affordability Action Plan | Alice Petrova, Product Designer

01 / The Promise

There is no MVP.

On November 22, 2022, the Government of Alberta announced the Affordability Action Plan. The announcement carried a commitment to a date: payments to vulnerable Albertans would begin within weeks.

The infrastructure to deliver them did not yet exist. No portal, no eligibility logic, no identity flow, no payment rails. A small cross-ministry team had sixty days to build all of it.

There is no MVP for a benefits program. The day the portal opens, real people show up with real urgency.

02 / The Problem

A different category of problem.

Building a benefits program isn't mechanically difficult. Building one with a public launch date, for over a million people, across separate ministry data systems, is a different category of problem.

01
Eligibility
Existing programs came first: AISH, Income Support, PDD, Alberta Seniors Benefit, and foster and kinship care. Then the public: households under $180,000 with children or seniors.
02
Identity
Public funds, real recipients, no duplicates. The team built on MyAlberta Digital ID and 2021 CRA tax data, so no one re-entered what the province already knew.
03
Payments
Monthly deposits through Canada's largest banks, with cheques as a fallback. Edge cases, like ageing out of eligibility, were modelled up front.
04
Reach
Not everyone could or would apply online. Day 1 had 50+ in-person locations, support in 100+ languages and two staffed help lines.

03 / The Approach

Service first, screens second.

Before any screen was drawn, the team mapped the program end-to-end. Not the application. Not the dashboard. The entire benefit, from political announcement to final payment to post-program manual case management.

Multi-ministry workshops in FigJam surfaced where existing programs overlapped. The questions were structural: who does the province already know, who needs fresh authentication, and where do programs conflict?

That exercise produced two parallel intake paths, each designed against a different user model.

Path A / Auto-Enrollment

~300K

Pre-authenticated. Pre-enrolled. No application required. Portal load and input-error risk removed for the most vulnerable cohort before the doors opened.

Path B / Public Portal

~700K

Fresh attestation through MyAlberta Digital ID, cross-referenced against CRA tax data. Designed for the worst-case user, not the best-case one.

Portal screen confirming the applicant will be auto-enrolled through their current program

Both paths ended on the same payment rail. Behind them, an internal tool let case managers handle what automation couldn't, including cases that ran past the June 30 close.

Portal payment details screen: monthly instalments, payment method and eligible dependants

04 / The Craft

Token-deep, on a sixty-day clock.

Sixty days left no room for a clean waterfall. The team started with three product designers and finished with one, working in tight loops with developers.

01
Tokens first
Type, colour, spacing and component states all pointed to one master file. When legal needed one compliance line changed across the portal, it took an afternoon.
02
Accessibility from the start
WCAG 2.1 shaped every component before visual design: focus and error states, content density, masking for sensitive fields.
03
No handoff
Daily standups with engineers replaced handoff. Decisions lived in the working file. The file structure was the project history.

05 / Launch Day

January 18, 2023.

On launch day, designers, developers and support staff watched the system together and shipped live front-end fixes to ease the call lines.

09:00 AM

Forty thousand applications already submitted

40,000

08:00 PM

Ninety-two thousand applications covering ~160,000 people, including 120,000 children

92,000

+24 HRS

Applications successfully processed for payment

140,000

Day-1 traffic beat projections. Slow confirmations and busy phone lines were fixed with front-end and copy changes, not a backend rebuild. The platform held.

The work upstream of launch day is the entire work.

06 / Reflection

What the project defined.

01
Design the service before the screens.
Eligibility and identity logic are design surface, not back-end detail.
02
Know which decisions are reversible.
Some end up in Albertans' tax returns and case files.
03
Coordination is facilitated, not found.
Time-boxed, documented workshops left each ministry a decision record that outlived the program.

Project credits

Team

Cross-functional: service designers, digital architects, product designers, developers, multi-ministry stakeholders

Recognition

Public benefit delivered to ~1.2M Albertans against an eight-week build window

Sources & Public Reporting

Program announced by Premier Danielle Smith, November 22, 2022. Portal launched January 18, 2023. Government of Alberta news releases, January 9 & 17, 2023.
Day-1 application figures: Government of Alberta press secretary statement; Deputy Premier Nathan Neudorf, January 18, 2023 (reported by CBC News).
Total program envelope ($900M) and per-recipient amount ($100/month × 6 months): CTV News Edmonton, January 9, 2023; CBC News, January 18, 2023.
First payment day distribution figures (Jan 31, 2023): Andrea Farmer, press secretary to the Minister of Affordability and Utilities, statement of January 31, 2023.
Cumulative enrolment of ~1.2M by end of March 2023: Government of Alberta news release, March 31, 2023, on CPPD expansion.
Auto-enrolment of ~300K Albertans across AISH, Income Support, PDD, Alberta Seniors Benefit, and foster/kinship caregivers; ~700K manual applicants through portal: Government of Alberta release, February 9, 2023.
Authentication via MyAlberta Digital ID and 2021 CRA tax data; $180,000 household income threshold: Government of Alberta program documentation, January 2023.
50+ in-person service locations and 100+ languages of support: Government of Alberta release; multiple secondary reporting sources, January 2023.