When leadership saw rising service request volume as a content problem, I saw something bigger. This is the story of how a diagnostic reframe turned a website improvement project into an agency-wide service channel strategy.
TL;DR — Impact
I am a designer by training and a systems thinker by practice. I do my best work inside complex environments where surface problems often mask structural ones. At the BC Public Service Agency, I led a structured diagnostic across the HR digital ecosystem — reframing a content task into an organizational challenge, then translating research into strategic recommendations that reached directors and assistant deputy ministers.
Careers & MyHR is the centralized HR website for BC Public Service employees, a platform serving 40,000+ people across 60+ ministries, housing policy explanations, procedural guidance, and forms. Adjacent to it, AskMyHR operates as a shared intake platform: employees submit HR questions and requests, which get routed to the appropriate team, including the HR Service Centre.
By the time I stepped into the Supervisor & Content Strategist role (first covering a vacancy, then retained temporarily), service request volume was climbing by 1,000–2,000 tickets per month. Employees were waiting weeks for answers. Leadership's working assumption was clear: if the website content were clearer, fewer employees would need to submit requests.
Before touching a single page, I asked a different question.
Rather than begin editing content immediately, I reframed the mandate around a single question:
How do BC Public Service employees actually go about finding answers to their HR-related questions?
That shift in framing — from "what should the content say?" to "how do people seek help?" — changed everything that followed. It expanded the scope beyond the website and revealed a fragmented support ecosystem operating without a shared mental model.
I partnered with an EY consultant engaged by the branch and naturally took the lead on the research activities that followed. My supervisor gave me the latitude to pursue a more structured, phased diagnostic before any content changes were made.
Participants were given realistic HR scenarios — for example: You've been summoned for jury duty. What does this mean for your job? Critically, scenarios were framed in a way that did not presuppose use of the HR website. I wanted to see what employees actually did first.
The most common first move was asking a supervisor or a trusted colleague. Supervisors, in turn, often checked Careers & MyHR themselves — because many ministries and divisions lacked dedicated HR representatives, ministry intranets, or other resources to consult. The support burden cascaded upward.
Most used a search engine and appended "Careers & MyHR" to their query — a workaround born of experience with a search tool they didn't trust. The BC Government website hosting Careers & MyHR had two search bars: one for the entire government site (visible at the top of every page), and one for Careers & MyHR specifically (visible only on some pages). The distinction was easy to miss.
Employees searched using natural language — "jury duty." The website used policy language — "juror summons." The mismatch meant correct pages went unfound, not because the content didn't exist, but because the keywords didn't match how people think. Search was commonly described as unreliable. My research explained precisely why.
Content structure was inconsistent across Careers & MyHR's 750 pages. The style guide addressed visual presentation, not information hierarchy. Employees frequently said, in effect: I can see this page is about my topic, but I still don't know what it means for my specific situation. They needed context, not just information.
Most employees equated AskMyHR with the HR Service Centre — unaware that it routes submissions to multiple teams depending on the category selected. The dropdown routing system was extensive and confusing; many pages on Careers & MyHR included a generic "can't find what you're looking for? Submit a service request" link without guiding employees to the correct category. Requests were frequently misdirected — including to the content team I worked on.
"I would have given up searching Careers & MyHR long ago if you weren't watching."
The website was not the system. It was one node in a fragmented support ecosystem. Employees, supervisors, Google, ministry intranets, AskMyHR, and the HR Service Centre all existed in this ecosystem — without a shared mental model connecting them.
From this diagnostic, I established a clear goal to guide my team and all subsequent recommendations:
Make Careers & MyHR accessible (employees can locate information), usable (they can understand it), and useful (it covers their actual needs) — so employees walk away with answers, not more questions.
The most direct structural intervention I developed was a content completeness framework, derived entirely from observed user behaviour. It defined a consistent structure for every page on Careers & MyHR — not as a style preference, but as a behavioral necessity:
I aligned my writing team and supervisors around this framework, then enforced it in collaboration with business area representatives across the organization. It was not optional. It became the governance standard.
Guided by research findings, I led a redesign of the primary entry point for 40,000+ employees. Key changes:
To operationalize the framework at scale, I led a full content audit of Careers & MyHR's 750 pages. The audit mapped every page and recorded what changes were needed: language updates, layout restructuring, removal of generic AskMyHR links, and completeness gaps. This created a structured remediation plan that allowed the team to execute changes directly or in collaboration with the relevant business areas.
I initiated a search term audit starting with the highest-volume service request categories. By mapping the gap between employee language ("jury duty") and page keywords ("juror summons"), I created a foundation for metadata improvements that would help on-site search return relevant results. This work also informed the broader search tool improvements and validated the case for the tool replacement that was already underway.
I synthesized all four phases of research into a structured report with findings and phased recommendations. The report was distributed to directors, senior managers, and assistant deputy ministers. It became the foundational document for a subsequent agency-wide initiative: the Service Channel Strategy.
Recommendations were organized into three phases, sequenced by complexity, resource requirements, and dependency on prior work.
The executive synthesis report did more than document findings — it reframed the organization's understanding of the problem. What began as a mandate to improve website content became the foundation for a broader Service Channel Strategy, an ongoing initiative that extended well beyond the original scope of the project.
Before that initiative matured, the team implemented tangible improvements: stronger governance alignment across 60+ distributed content contributors, keyword and taxonomy improvements to support more reliable search behaviour, and a content framework that brought consistency and completeness to a platform that had operated without structural standards.
Stepping into inherited complexity and mapping fragmented ecosystems. The platform, the intake system, supervisors, ministry intranets, and search behavior were all part of one entangled system. I mapped it before recommending anything.
Structured, phased problem diagnosis instead of reactive execution. I resisted the pull toward immediate output and earned the space to understand the problem first. That reframe changed what got built.
Pattern recognition across behavioral, technical, and organizational layers. The same dysfunction appeared in different forms — in search, in content structure, in routing, in governance. Seeing across those layers made it possible to recommend solutions that addressed causes, not symptoms.
Translation of UX insight into executive-level strategy. The research reached directors and ADMs and became the foundation for an agency-wide initiative. The work mattered at a strategic level, not just a craft level.
Introduction and enforcement of scalable standards. A content framework I derived from behavioral research became an organizational governance standard across 750 pages and 60+ business areas.