Rebuilding Trust in Self-Service: A UX-First Consultation

This case study is anonymized as per requirements of this public sector organization. No identifying details are shared to ensure confidentiality and compliance with privacy standards.

Project Details

An Albertan County municipality was preparing to redesign its citizen self-service portal for reporting issues, submitting requests, and providing feedback to the municipality. But before diving into development, they knew they needed a clear and accessible UX strategy grounded in real user needs. That’s where we came in.

Our consultation was focused on helping the County improve the portal’s usability and accessibility for the thousands of residents who rely on it. It wasn’t just about designing a better interface; it was about helping the County streamline and unify the experience for department staff, build internal alignment around user experience, and lay the groundwork for a citizen-first digital future.

Problem Statement

The citizen self-service portal was a vital tool that allowed residents to submit issues to the County—but it had become bloated, confusing, and hard to navigate. The County needed a partner who could guide a strategic UX overhaul while helping them build buy-in across internal teams. With no single department owning the platform and years of patchwork fixes behind it, the County was ready to do things right—but needed help mapping the way forward.

Adding to the urgency, the original technology powering the portal was being sunsetted. This created a clear opportunity—not just to rebuild the system on a new platform, but to reimagine it from the ground up with a focus on accessibility, clarity, and user-centred design.

What We Did

We started by conducting staff interviews with both leadership and frontline workers to understand internal challenges, workflows, and user pain points from the service provider side. From there, we completed a comparative analysis, looking at similar self-service platforms across Alberta and globally to benchmark best practices. 

Next, we mapped the existing user journey, identifying where residents encountered friction—whether due to overwhelming content, ambiguous labels, or poor search functionality. We also created proto-personas to reflect the needs of rural and urban residents and guided our team and the client toward more empathetic decision-making.

To validate our findings, we conducted moderated user testing on the current portal platform, allowing us to observe real users struggling with navigation, form usability, and issue reporting. We then followed that with a large-scale online card sort, where 120 County residents helped reorganize the portal’s content into more intuitive categories.

All of this research directly informed the solutions we proposed. Using the patterns, behaviors, and insights we uncovered, we developed clear recommendations for information architecture, navigation structure, content consolidation, search optimization, accessibility, and case tracking. We also created wireframes, and then full mockups, to visualize those recommendations—both for internal feedback and to guide third-party developers during implementation.

This wasn’t just a consultation—it was a strategic partnership, rooted in evidence and built to set the County up for long-term success.

Outcomes

The outcomes of this consultation have already had a lasting impact! One of the most significant results was the internal shift within the County towards a centered mindset. Departments that had previously worked in silos began to align around a shared understanding of their residents’ needs—thanks in large part to the data, testing insights, and mockups we delivered.

Our collaboration helped the County recognize the value of UX not just for this project, but for future digital services as well. Their team is now equipped with a more strategic approach to content design, accessibility, and cross-department communication. The clear information architecture, simplified categories, and improved support visibility we proposed are being used to guide development with their third-party vendor.

While this phase was focused on strategy—not execution—our work established the benchmarks that will define long-term success: faster routing of issues, more consistent communication with residents, improved accessibility (especially for seniors and rural users), and reduced user frustration with search and navigation.

Just as importantly, the relationship we’ve built with the County continues to grow. As they move into Phase 2, we remain a trusted partner—advising on IA refinements, wireframe testing, and cross-department collaboration to ensure the portal’s evolution reflects the needs of the people it’s built for.