September 2013 – February 2014
Note: All work products for this project are protected under NDA. For more details, please contact me directly.
The Project
In consideration of the design and development of an e-licensing system for hunting in British Columbia, the Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Management Branch (FWHMB) of the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Operations (FLNRO), in partnership with the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services (MTIC), undertook a user-experience-based service design research study to better understand the entire ecosystem of hunting licensing in British Columbia. The purpose of this study was twofold. First and foremost, its purpose was to examine the hunting licensing process from the hunters’ perspective in order to identify potential areas of opportunity for information and service delivery improvement across the entire program area, including but also reaching beyond the limits of an e-licensing program. Its second purpose was to form a proof of concept for the development of a service design program within the provincial government. Number 41 Media was contracted to conduct this research and present the findings to numerous stakeholders from both FWHMB and MTIC.
As the lead researcher for this project, I was largely responsible for the planning and execution of a qualitative research study that used behavioural interviews with resident hunters and other hunting stakeholders across BC to identify information and service delivery gaps within the existing hunting ecosystem and to further identify areas of opportunity stemming from these gaps.
Research
I first began by immersing myself in the hunting program from a hunter’s perspective. I conducted a detailed environmental scan of the hunting program website and read every other piece of publicly available information that pertained to the hunting program in order to develop two research artifacts: a mindmap of the entire hunting ecosystem and a motivation matrix of all the hunting program stakeholders.
I then facilitated two separate workshops with government staff which consisted of two distinct yet related activities. In the first activity, I asked participants to work in small groups to make revisions and corrections to the printed mindmap using felt pens and sticky notes. I then asked participants to complete a motivation matrix, in which the diagonal cells from top left to bottom right in a chart were to identify the various stakeholder groups’ motivations for participating in the hunting program and the remaining cells were to identify the interactions that occur between stakeholder groups.
These completed activities were then applied to my development of a stakeholder research plan. I then embarked on a multi-week tour of British Columbia to conduct behavioural interviews with hunters and other hunting stakeholders throughout the province. The results of these sessions were then captured in a research findings document that was presented to the internal stakeholders at the FWHMB and MTIC.
Rebecca Harper 