About the Digital Transformation Office

Emilie joined the federal public service as a financial officer after graduating from the University of Ottawa in 2007. However, her desire to engage with people and work as a team led her to change fields. Her minor in Communications allowed her to move into a web communications role where she quickly developed an interest for content design. As a senior digital specialist at Public Services and Procurement Canada, she led initiatives to redesign websites and improve services. Emilie’s attention to detail and ability to challenge the status quo makes her an effective user advocate.

Before joining the DTO, Emilie was a user experience researcher within the Client Experience Unit at Service Canada. Her planning, research and usability testing helped to optimize designs and improve usability for some of the key services used by Canadians. Understanding how users think and where they struggle inspires her to find solutions. Emilie’s passion for improving the user experience is leading her to pursue a UX certificate at Bentley University.

Miguel is one of the research leads for top task improvements for the Canada.ca. He focuses on finding the best questions to ask about how Canadians are completing their top tasks and where they encounter difficulties. He has been working collaboratively with user experience (UX) experts in Ottawa to bring the latest design research techniques into the Canadian civil service.

He is encouraging more thought around usability test design and use of analytics to develop empathy with website visitors. Miguel is also trying to find like-minded people in the Government of Canada who are trying to adapt behavioural insights to help government better achieve policy objectives and make change for Canadians.

M-R has been working in, on and around web (internal and external) for over 20 years, first in the private sector and then the Ontario and federal governments, in the content design, e-communications and operations sides. She has led both external and internal web renewal projects for several organizations. She’s had different touchpoints with Canada.ca over the last five years, initially as a theme lead for How government works and Public service and military, before joining the DTO in April 2019.

A strong believer in the power of community collaboration and iterative work, she’s worked throughout her career to foster better organizational working relationships, break silos and have fun at work.

Gil is a digital pioneer with over 25 years of digital transformation experience as a public servant, consultant and business leader. His roles have involved project leadership, product development, business transformation, information and business architecture and application development.

He has a proven track record working with extended project teams, across and between organizations to develop innovative and award winning digital solutions involving content management, search, analytics, and machine learning. His diverse experience includes public and private sector engagements throughout Canada, the United States and Europe.

Adey is a Project Coordinator at the Digital Transformation Office. She is focused on helping DTO deliver a better GC web presence by engaging with various partners, coordinating schedules, and ensuring the right tools and resources are in place to deliver on improving top tasks. Prior to joining the DTO, Adey worked with several companies in a marketing and communications function. Adey recently completed her MBA at the Ted Rogers School of Management, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy with concentration in Global Studies.

Lisa is a User Experience (UX) architect and behavioural researcher with over 25 years of experience. Over her career, she has led multi-disciplinary design teams for a range of products and services, won innovation awards and has personally facilitated over 1,000 hours of UX research.

After Nortel, she joined a cognitive research team at Carleton University. Lisa was UX research lead consultant for Canada.ca, and an active GitHub collaborator on the Government of Canada’s Web Experience Toolkit (WET). Back before UX was even a thing, Lisa completed a master’s degree in computer science in the psychology of programming.

Dave has been working as Senior Interaction Designer with the Digital Transformation Office for several years now, after twenty years in the private sector working in digital design and development. He is responsible for growing the project’s design systems, and spends most of his time creating and evaluating page layouts, user interface patterns and navigation systems for Canada.ca.

He loves things that work well, and loathes those that are difficult, confusing or otherwise inconvenient for the people trying to use them. He applies his design expertise to help ensure that people’s experiences on Canada.ca are as efficient and pleasant as possible. His personal mission is to make the digital world a little friendlier, and a little easier - one piece at a time.

Patrick has been working in user experience design and research for 20 years. With a degree in Psychology, he applied his research and analysis training to digital communications and design for the United Nations and other international agencies based in Geneva, Switzerland before moving to Ottawa.

He spent a decade working in start-ups based in Ottawa and Connecticut, leading design for products used by some of the largest school districts in the United States. Patrick has been working to improve service delivery for the Government of Canada since 2009.

Jennifer has been working as a designer for nearly a decade, but it was a passion to genuinely improve experiences (and to solve real problems for real users) that made her decide to specialize in Interaction Design in recent years.

Joining the Digital Transformation Office team was the perfect opportunity to help others through design. Working here presents the unique challenge, and opportunity, to build better government services for all Canadians. Together she works to validate and test ideas, building data-driven solutions for the public.

David started his career in the federal public service at the Canada Revenue Agency in 2007, after studying French literature and French teaching. As he was updating publications and web pages, he found his real passion: organizing information and developing content for people, based on their real needs. Since then, his goal has been to simplify and clarify the content in order to allow users to complete their tasks as easily as possible.

He continued his career at Service Canada, with Canada.ca’s Principal Publisher, and then at Global Affairs Canada, where he used his web expertise to enhance content used by thousands of people. David joined the Treasury Board Digital Transformation team with the same desire to strive to make the Government of Canada’s web presence more accessible, more understandable, easier to use and more focused on people’s needs.

Laura has been transforming web content for the federal government for the past 15 years. She has led both external and internal web renewal projects for various organizations. She has also worked as a technical training consultant in the private sector, and has spent years as an arts educator for children and youth. A teacher at heart, Laura is passionate about making complicated government services easy to find and understand for Canadians.

Laura joined the DTO in late 2017. Her role is to facilitate the evolution of web publishing standards for the Government of Canada, by ensuring that they reflect the most up-to-date content design principles.

Peter manages product design for Canada.ca, leading a small but mighty team of usability researchers and interaction designers. Over a 20-year career in the public service, he’s also managed Web and print publishing, designed corporate identity systems, and copyedited far too many news releases and annual reports.

While in academia, he obtained a BA in Anthropology and dabbled in archaeology and literary criticism.

Jane is an information scientist and information architect who has practiced the discipline of organizing for over 25 years. She has designed standards-based and user-centered classification schemes, taxonomies, thesauri, and web navigation systems, and her designs have been implemented in websites, intranets, and interactive applications managed by both private and public sector organizations.

As an employee, her career has included practitioner and leadership roles at Bell-Northern Research, Nortel, Industry Canada, and Systemscope. As a consultant, she has completed over 60 digital transformation projects with a wide variety of organizations. She has operated her independent design firm, Aboutness Inc., since 2010.