Company
Ontario Ministry of Transportation
Date
May 2024 – Oct 2024
Tools used
Overview
A 16-month co-op project with the Ministry of Transportation's Engagement and Advisory Branch — creating a digital registration and tracking system for employee training courses.
My Role
User Research — Led discovery workshops and interviews with Business Service Analysts (BSAs), managers, and employees.
UX Design — Designed prototypes for three distinct user types: training coordinator, employee, and manager.
Usability Testing — Facilitated three testing phases with BSAs and managers, iterating on feedback each round.
Process Improvement — Co-created a streamlined, employee-driven registration model to reduce coordinator workload.
How might we help training coordinators by reducing the time-consuming, complex, and manual nature of their current workflow?
Background Information
The Training Coordination Solutions project was developed to address the growing complexity of managing employee training across the Ontario Ministry of Transportation's Engagement and Advisory Branch. Training coordinators were responsible for organizing, registering, and tracking dozens of courses across the branch — all while managing multiple disconnected systems and fielding requests through email.
The ministry's existing process placed coordinators at the centre of every action: employees couldn't register themselves, managers had to relay requests, and there was no single source of truth for tracking who was enrolled in what. This created a significant administrative burden and introduced frequent errors and delays.
The goal of this project was to design a digital system that would streamline the end-to-end training workflow — empowering employees to self-register, reducing the coordinator's manual workload, and giving managers clear visibility into their team's training progress.
Discovery and Insights
During the discovery phase, we conducted workshops and semi-structured interviews with the three core user groups: Business Service Analysts (BSAs) acting as training coordinators, managers who relay training requests, and employees who attend courses.
Key insights that shaped the design direction:
Coordinators spent a disproportionate amount of time on manual data entry and status chasing — tasks that could be automated or delegated. Employees had no direct visibility into what courses were available or when they were offered. Managers acted as unnecessary middlemen, forwarding requests they had no capacity to track. LearnON, the existing platform, was poorly adopted because it didn't reflect the branch's actual workflow.
These findings led us to redesign the registration model around employee self-service, with coordinators shifting into an oversight role rather than an operational one.
Prototypes
Manage Courses (Training Coordinator View)
A dashboard allowing coordinators to create, manage, and track training courses across the branch. Coordinators can view enrollment numbers, manage waitlists, and export records — all from a single interface.
Find & Register for Courses (Employee View)
An employee-facing course catalogue that lets staff browse available sessions, view details, and self-register without involving a manager or coordinator. Registration status is tracked in real time.
View Employee Training (Manager View)
A read-only reporting view that gives managers clear visibility into their team's training progress, upcoming sessions, and completion records — without becoming a bottleneck in the registration process.
