Mines Digital Services is a data-first platform that helps the Ministry of Mines keep track of all mines within the province. It stores key mine data such as the operating status, name, contact information, location and important documents associated to the mine. Users can use this platform to search, update and manage mine records.
Mines Digital Services
Data driven development where we change the existing system to a new and improved system.
Brand and Identity
Web Application Design
User research
UI/UX Designer
Web Application
Figma, Sketch,
Invision
2 years
Agency
In 2014 an incident occurred in Mount Polly in 2014 where a four square kilometre sized tailings pond full of toxic copper and gold mining waste breached, spilling an estimated 25 billion litres of contaminated materials into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. This resulted to a huge impact on the climate, and the public lacking trust in the Ministry of Mines.
We participated in many workshops with the stakeholders and key users of the application during the two years we worked on the project. These multi-day workshops were incredibly helpful to make sure we were still on track with what mattered most for the users using the new application.
As part of the agile process we put the main user stories in the pink post-its, the yellow post-its would be edge cases within the user stories and the orange were what the expected behaviour should be. Once we wrote all those out, the stakeholders voted on what features were most valuable to them.
At the end of the multi-day workshops we would recap with the whole team to make sure we were all aligned for the upcoming quarter. This process was incredibly helpful in getting to talk more with the users' and prioritize features.
During the process of creating the application we met with over 80 different ministry staff to find out what was holding them back in the old system. The user's we spoke to were:
In the user interviews we asked them the pain points of their current system, the process they used to record data into the system, and watched them submit a report. So we could reach an accurate representation in the province, some of these interviews were online and done through a video call, and others who were in Victoria we did in person.
These users were very frustrated with the process they originally were using, some would even go out of their way to document in other systems like excel spreadsheets just to make sure the data was accurate. The results were astounding and helped us get a clear idea of what the user's were looking for in MVP.
Based on the user interviews we conducted the two user's we would account for in MVP were the auth admins and inspectors. That way we can get the data correct on the new application.
Brenda Smith
• Tasks take a long time due to systems not connected
• Duplication of work adds confusion
• Systems are tailored for whole ministry, not specific user
• Doing tasks in spreadsheets instead of system
• One platform to search for reliable information
• One platform to input information of a mine
Greg Roderickson
• Reporting takes too long due to systems not connected
• Offline application does not sync with new system
• Keep reporting documents on his own device
• Ability to search for mines quickly and effectively
• Input data required for reporting into one system
• Ability to see mine information to get to location
• Ability to take mine information offsite for inspection
Brand new branding for Mines digital services. To symbolize many variations of data into one 'core' system.
Active Core Users
Compliance related reports
Mines records Cleaned by the data quality team
