BC Ministry of Health

January 2014 – November 2014

Note: All work products for this project are protected under NDA. For more details, please contact me directly.

The Project

Following the successful delivery of a new information architecture for the Medical Services Plan of BC, the Ministry of Health approached Number 41 Media in mid-2013 to discuss the re-architecting of the entire Ministry website – all 17,346 pages. In keeping with the web strategy of the provincial government, the Ministry was wanting to move their web presence to the main gov.bc.ca website.

With my experience working directly for the provincial government in 2012 and my history with the Medical Services Plan project in 2013, it made sense that I would be the UX and IA lead for this project.

Research

In addition to a content inventory of all 17,346 pages of health.gov.bc.ca, I conducted behavioural interviews with external users, including healthcare service providers, health research organizations, and BC residents. During these interviews, I explored the many different aspects of the work of the Ministry of Health. These interviews helped to enrich my understanding of how these different user groups understand and think of health-related content as well as how these user groups interact with the Ministry of Health, both directly and indirectly.

Information Architecture

Combining both the results of the content inventory and the findings from the research sessions, and working within the existing structure of gov.bc.ca. I designed a new topic-based structure for the Ministry’s content. The existing gov.bc.ca website included content themes such as Health & Safety, B.C. Residents, Environment and Government. In some cases, I leveraged the existing structure of the theme to place Ministry of Health content within the theme while limiting the disruption to existing content. In other cases, such as the theme of Health & Safety, I redesigned the entire structure within the theme to better represent the work of the Ministry of Health from a user-centric perspective.

Content Migration & Creation

Although the structure of the site moved from organization-based to topic-based, much of the content that existed continue to be relevant with a few modifications. With the exception of one section of content that was completely removed from the site, I migrated the entirety of health.gov.bc.ca into the new site structure. I crafted additional introductory content at the top three levels of navigation across the entire site. From there, I facilitated six “Writing for the Web” workshops with more than 60 content administrators at the Ministry. Attendees learned the essentials of information architecture, content creation and metadata development. Each content administrator received an editable version of their business unit’s content and applied the knowledge they had gained during the workshops to the revision and creation of content as required. When they had completed the first round of revisions, they emailed me a copy and I worked through their changes. This iterative process was complemented with one-on-one meetings and, in some cases, group meetings with multiple business units sharing content areas, as required and continued until both myself and the content administrator were satisfied with the final draft. Following the necessary approval processes, the expansion of gov.bc.ca went live in early 2015.