The Challenge
Booking a road test should be simple, clear, and accessible. As demand for the service grows, the booking process becomes harder for people to access and harder for staff to manage. The service relied on a call-only booking option available only during business hours, limited public-facing information on the process, and an outdated, labour-intensive notification system that struggled to provide consistent updates because of its reliance on a monolithic legacy database.
The Approach
Davis Pier and Kainos are leading the design and development of an enhanced service experience to deliver the book-a-road-test service in a way that is modern, simple to use, and a positive service experience. This approach also strives to reduce internal operational burdens and create efficiencies for staff, drivers, friends and family of drivers, and driving schools.
Our work is grounded in the principles of human-centred service design, and our approach was structured around 3 fundamental principles:
- Agile Management and Delivery. To be constantly in ‘Learn and Adapt’ mode, reacting to new information daily and integrating it into the work.
- Focused Staff Engagement. Multifaceted engagement, input, and support from many other teams within vehicle services.
- Transparent Collaboration. An open and collaborative approach, sharing progress and inviting challenges to our work in the spirit of improving the process and the outcome.
The Work
Residents of the province can now book and fully manage their road tests online. While the modernization efforts for vehicle services are still ongoing, the work to reach this milestone included in-depth discovery, interface research and design, and an analysis of current processes and opportunities for service improvements and process optimization.
Wide-net Discovery
We worked closely with the client to understand and document the book-a-road-test journey, identify the pain points and needs of diverse users through engagement and primary research. Key audiences we engaged with include customer service representatives, customer service leads, driver examiners, schedule coordinators, program coordinators, driving schools, and drivers.
This work defined the detailed road map to modernization and identified a minimum viable product (MVP) for the staff interface.
MVP Staff Interface
Our team worked with the client and key audiences to research, design, and test user interface designs for customer service staff. We worked within the existing infrastructure and processes of the managing department to configure development environments and deployment pipelines and to build a new front-end application within their existing design library. This foundational work enabled the development of a new web-based tool for customer service representatives to find the earliest available appointment across multiple locations and search parameters.
We designed and developed functionality that enables users to efficiently search for road test availability and apply several parameters specific to individual user preferences (date, test class, and location, etc.).
All this work is rigourously tested at multiple stage throughout development, including integration testing, functional testing, user acceptance testing, and testing to ensure compliance with industry standards and best practices. Our approach to digital modernization projects always includes continuous feedback, user testing, and refinement. We’ve continued to collect feedback and iterate the tool to meet the needs of customer service representatives and, in turn, to improve the customer service experiences for Canadians.
