Providing a place for prototyping and user research

Service Canada Labs is a prototyping, user research and testing site, and the first of its kind for the Government of Canada.​ The site is a foundational piece of user-focused and agile product delivery at Employment and Social Development Canada.

In the spirit of working in the open and getting feedback early and often, the site hosts product prototypes from the discovery to beta phase and invites clients, stakeholders and employees to provide feedback. Prototypes can be as simple as an image all the way through to coded services using test data.

In addition to collecting feedback from visitors, the Labs site serves as a collection point for user-research participants. Participants give anonymous feedback, and can sign-up to become members of user pools to participate in in-depth and ongoing user research.

Prototyping and user research underpin the service design process at Employment and Social Development Canada. Participants should be interested in cross governmental approaches to navigating bureaucracy and getting to live, the conflict between running agile teams under waterfall approvals processes and user research compensation.