Why Canada's Best Public Services Start with the People Who Use Them

By Alec Wenzowski. President & Co-Founder, Button Inc.

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Across Canada, public-sector organizations are delivering increasingly sophisticated digital services. From online applications and open data platforms to GIS tools and AI-enabled systems, technology now plays a central role in how people interact with government and public institutions. 

As this digital landscape and our habits continue to evolve, one approach has proven increasingly valuable: human-centred design. Not as a trend or a buzzword, but as a realistic and helpful way to ensure public-sector technology delivers meaningful, lasting impact for the people it serves. 

Digital Services Are Doing More Than Ever 

Public-sector technology today carries significant responsibility. Digital services are often the primary way people access programs, information, and support. These systems must work for a wide range of users, across different regions, abilities, ages and contexts. 

Canadian public organizations are navigating complex requirements – accessibility standards, privacy protections, bilingual delivery, and coordination across jurisdictions – while continually striving to improve service quality and efficiency. It’s no small task and reflects a genuine commitment to serving the public well. 

Human-centred design helps support that commitment by aligning digital tools through the empathetic lens of real-world needs and experiences. 

Benefiting from Thoughtful Design 

Remember that Canada’s public sector operates within a uniquely diverse environment. Geographic scale, cultural diversity, and multiple levels of government all contribute to shaping how services are designed and delivered. 

At the same time, Canada benefits from strong public institutions and a high degree of trust in those institutions. Digital services play an increasingly important role in maintaining that trust by making interactions clear, accessible and respectful of people’s time and circumstances. 

Human-centred design fits naturally within this context. It offers a way to reflect the Canadian values of equity, inclusion and transparency directly in the systems people use every day. 

What Human-Centred Design Looks Like in Practice

Human-centred design goes beyond improving interfaces or refining visual design. In the public sector, it often means taking a service-wide perspective, which includes:

• engaging users and stakeholders early to understand their needs and constraints
  
  
• designing end-to-end services, not just individual digital touch points; and
  
  
• balancing policy, operational, and technical considerations alongside user experience

When well executed, human-centred design can help teams make informed decisions early on in a project, helping to reduce uncertainty and creating shared clarity around goals and outcomes.

Rather than adding complexity, it helps teams focus their efforts where they matter most.

Supporting Complex Systems with Clarity

Public-sector technology often supports complex workflows, data sets and decision-making processes. Tools like GIS platforms, analytics dashboards, and AI-enabled systems offer powerful capabilities, but their value depends on how well people can understand and use them.

Human-centred design helps translate complexity into clarity. By focusing on real user workflows and decision points, teams can design systems that are both robust and approachable. Service Canada's dashboard redesign, for example, consolidated multiple benefits onto a single page based on user testing with over 500,000 Canadians, significantly reducing call center volume and improving task completion rates. 

Similarly, Natural Resources Canada's Federal Geospatial Platform transformed over 5,000 scattered geospatial datasets into an accessible "single window" interface, enabling evidence-based decision-making across departments. During COVID-19, this clarity of design allowed the platform to support the Public Health Agency's response in under 72 hours.

This approach supports not only external users, but also internal teams who rely on digital tools to do their work effectively. Clearer systems reduce friction, support adoption, and help organizations get the full value from their technology investments.

The Benefits of a Human-Centred Approach

When public-sector technology is designed with people at the forefront, the benefits are tangible. Services become easier to navigate and more intuitive to use. Adoption improves because tools align with real needs and expectations. Support demands decrease as systems better anticipate common questions and scenarios.
Internally, teams gain clearer insight into how services are used and where improvements will have the greatest impact. Over time, this leads to more resilient systems that can evolve alongside changing policies, technologies, and community needs.
Human-centred design doesn’t eliminate complexity entirely, of course, but it helps manage it in a way that supports both users and organizations.

‍Looking Ahead: Why This Approach Matters Now

Public-sector organizations across Canada are continuing to explore emerging technologies, including AI and advanced data platforms. These tools offer exciting opportunities to improve services, inform decision-making, and better serve communities.

At the same time, they introduce new considerations around transparency, governance, and usability. Human-centred design provides a strong foundation for navigating these changes responsibly, ensuring that innovation remains aligned with public values and real-world use.

With increasing expectations and finite resources, designing services thoughtfully from the outset helps organizations maximize impact while minimizing risk.

Designing for the Communities We Serve

Canada’s communities are diverse and public-sector digital services must reflect that diversity.

Human-centred design encourages teams to consider accessibility, inclusion, and geographic realities as core design inputs rather than afterthoughts.

It supports services that work across different levels of digital access and varying local contexts, from urban centres to coastal and remote communities.

By grounding design decisions in lived experience, public-sector organizations can create services that feel relevant, usable, and respectful to the people who rely on them.

A Shared Commitment to Better Public Services

Human-centred design is ultimately about partnership. It brings together public-sector expertise, technical capability, and lived experience to create digital services that work well for everyone involved.

Across Canada, many public organizations are already embracing this approach and seeing its value. As digital services continue to expand, human-centred design offers a proven way to build on existing strengths and deliver technology that supports trust, efficiency, and long-term success.

Designing public-sector tech with people at the centre isn’t about criticism. It’s about collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement. And it’s an essential part of shaping the future of public services in Canada.