Ontario Digital Service Lab opens shop in Communitech for user-based research

The provincial government is launching its new Ontario Digital Service Lab today,a space dedicated to user experience design for the government's digital services, and it's run by eight women.

• How do you build a more diverse tech company? It starts at the top
• Canadian tech companies say they value diversity but what are they doing about it?

The lab will be located in Communitech's offices indowntown Kitchener. There are three full-time staff and the first cohort of co-op students happen to be all women.

"Overall we speak more than seven languages, we've lived in more than 10 countries," Katherine Benjamin, the lab leader at Communitech with the Ontario Digital Service Lab.

She said the diversity of the inaugural team is something special.

"In thinking about some of the ways you build really inclusive digital products, it's really important to have a diverse team that represents the diversity in the people that you're trying to serve," she said.

Building user-friendly products

The Ontario Digital Service Lab will focus on improving the government's digital offering, which includes changing the Ontario.ca website so it's more user-friendly, and working with other ministries to make it more convenient for the public to interact with the government.

The launch event on Wednesday will feature a live demo a newOSAPcalculator developed by lab for the launch using its user-research lab the Empathy Lounge

Attendees can see how the team can use equipment like live video feed, live transcriptions and user-research software to improve products based on user feedback.

• For public servants with disabilities, some tools of the trade out of reach
• Checking in with Ontario's first chief digital officer

She said the work they do in the lab will help ensure the government products meet the needs of the end users.

"Everyday people can come into our lab, they can tell us a service they are using, and we will directly take the output of the content of that discussion and feed that into the next iteration of the product," Benjamin said.

She said globally there is a movement for digital transformation in the government in places like the United Kingdom and Australia.

"It is extremely rare to see something like this happening in government. You're much more likely to see it at Facebook, or Uber, or Spotify," Benjamin said.

"So bringing this into government in and of itself is really exciting."