My deliverables
I was the only designer on the multi-disciplinary agile product team that explored the feasibility of building a single point of access website for procurement opportunities from all levels of the Canadian public sector, including federal, territorial, provincial and municipal governments, as well as publicly-funded academic, social and health services institutions. A big driver for this work was needing to comply with the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union.
Also on the team were: a product manager, a design researcher, a design research student intern, and 2 developers.
Comparative analysis
I reviewed about 20 websites around the world with public sector procurement opportunities, including some private sector sites.
The UK’s Contract Finder and Digital Marketplace stood out as exemplars.
Restricted vocabulary
I defined a restricted vocabulary for the team, after I noticed that sometimes people used different terms to refer to the same things and the same terms to refer to different things.
Sometimes a tender is the thing requesting a bid and sometimes it’s the bid. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my concept models for key terms.
Contributed to research plan for a diary study
Overall, participants experienced difficulties in finding opportunities:
- Most only found 1 relevant opportunity during the diary study.
- Frequent disruptions with little time.
- Filters on different sites were either too broad or too specific.
Taxonomy
To explore the requirements of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) as well as other useful details.
I also attempted mapping the UNSPC codes for goods and services to more descriptive and intuitive categories in the industry, but ultimately the effort was a failure, as the UNSPC taxonomy is a combination of 3 other taxonomies, so there was little logic in how they were joined.
Content model
To drill down into relevant fields to display at different points in the business’s journey when finding a relevant contract, as well as the format the information should take. This model was a starting point for prototyping and usability testing with businesses to ensure it meets their needs.
Guidance to improve titles
Regardless of platforms or websites, all Canadian public sector procurement opportunities need better titles and descriptions to help suppliers find relevant opportunities.
My guidance also includes key nouns and verbs businesses used in the diary study.
Impact
Through our Discovery phase, we learned that the feasibility of creating a single site for all Canadian public sector procurement opportunities is limited by the format of data from the various public sector organizations involved.
However we were able to contribute to the field by documenting our findings and recommendations for other teams and organizations working in the procurement space.
I’m proud of the analysis and critical thinking I did on this project, as shown in my comparative analysis, taxonomy, and content model.
Kate Wilhelm 