Ministry of Education Discovery Research.
What does it actually take to keep 4,400 schools, 36,000 teachers, and 750,000 students moving through the same digital system?
Executive summary
The Government of Alberta's Ministry of Education needed to understand how teachers, school staff, and parents experienced its digital services before committing to a multi-year transformation. I led discovery research across three distinct audience segments, designing tailored protocols for each, conducting interviews and workshops across geographic regions and school types, and synthesizing qualitative findings into personas, journey maps, and recurring systemic pain points.
The work fed directly into the LearnAlberta.ca transformation and the ministry's broader digital service strategy, giving senior leadership an evidence base to prioritize against and a shared language for cross-departmental decision-making.
The problem.
A provincial education ministry runs on systems that touch nearly every household. When those systems are inconsistent, the friction lands on teachers preparing lessons at 9pm, registrars chasing paperwork, and parents who can't tell which login is which. The ministry knew it needed to modernize, but the research evidence to direct that work was thin and scattered across years of point-in-time studies.
The question wasn't "is the site bad." It was: where, across this whole service system, do small frictions stack into operational risk? And which audiences are absorbing that risk silently?
My role.
Senior UX Researcher, leading the research program end-to-end and presenting findings to senior departmental staff.
- Designed the research program.
Built three audience-specific protocols, sampling plans across geography and school type, and a synthesis model that could hold qualitative depth without losing comparability across segments.
- Ran the fieldwork.
Conducted in-depth interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents, and facilitated workshops that surfaced workarounds people had stopped reporting because nobody asked.
- Synthesized into shared artefacts.
Built personas and journey maps that ministry staff could quote in their own meetings. The test was whether a director could lift a slide and use it without me in the room.
- Translated findings into action.
Facilitated working sessions with senior staff to turn research into prioritization, not just insight. The goal was a backlog ministry teams owned.
- Designed against the findings.
Took the strategic recommendations into wireframes and high-fidelity designs for priority touchpoints, so the research handed off a working direction rather than only a brief.
Unique challenges.
- Three audiences, one system.
Teachers, registrars, and parents touch overlapping services through different lenses. Designing a protocol that surfaced their distinct needs while keeping cross-cutting themes legible required deliberate sampling and a synthesis framework that could hold both.
- Provincial scale, real geography.
Alberta is not a province you can interview from one city. Rural and northern voices required different recruitment and longer sessions, and they shifted the findings in ways urban-only research would have missed.
- Political surface area.
Education is a public-facing portfolio with elected accountability. Research outputs had to be defensible enough to survive a deputy minister's review and clear enough for a school board chair.
My process, highlights and takeaways.
- Discovery in the open.
Senior departmental staff sat in on synthesis sessions. It slowed the work down by a few days and saved months of "wait, why does the research say that?" conversations after the fact.
- Persona discipline.
Three personas, not seven. Each tied to a real operational role with a budget line and a manager. Personas without organizational gravity become wall art.
- Journey maps as decision tools.
The journeys weren't documentation, they were the artefact senior staff used to prioritize. The maps explicitly flagged which moments were the ministry's leverage points and which were vendor-owned.
- Cross-audience themes earned their place.
Themes that only showed up in one segment stayed at segment level. Themes that recurred across all three got promoted to strategy. The discipline kept the strategic recommendations small enough to actually execute.
Final thoughts.
What worked well. The multi-audience approach revealed cross-cutting themes I wouldn't have identified studying just one group. Facilitating workshops with ministry staff alongside presenting research findings created immediate buy-in and meant the work didn't end at handoff.
What I would change. I would have pushed for more parent participants from rural communities earlier in the research timeline. Their perspectives came later and revealed important accessibility considerations I could have explored more deeply.