Welcome to the late-October issue of the Button Insight newsletter!

Button creates meaningful digital services and we are excited to share our work, research, and learnings with you in our twice-monthly newsletter!

The insight you’ll receive in your inbox every two weeks will help you up your digital communications, user experience, and customer relationships.

We’d love your help to create the best pro tips, stories, and insights that will help you build reliable technology that maximizes citizen impact. So tell us what you’d like to learn from the Button newsletter by taking this survey. Yes, there are prizes!

Alec Wenzowski | President & Co-Founder | [email protected]

In This Issue

1. How the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation and highlighted key inequalities

2. Case Study: How CleanBC, powered by Button, won an international award for its reworked processes

3. Employee Showcase: Meet Zoey, a Service Designer by day and aerialist by night!

Need To Know

Thank you, Covid, for forcing needed digital transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the way we all live, for better or worse

The unfortunate and tragic loss of life in the pandemic will never be forgotten, and the personal pain that many will suffer forever is simply heartbreaking. The pandemic impacted the way we all live, for better or worse. While the scale of the problem was overwhelming, the adaptability and co-operation seen in response to it have been inspiring—and have produced silver linings that will help shape a better future. Some elegant solutions to problems, big & small, will stick with us for a long time.

The chaos of the pandemic was swift and the smallest changes impacted our lives every day. Thanks to markers on the floor of the grocery store aisles and check-out lines, we now have better queues. In the digital world, many businesses & organizations were forced to make a long-overdue digital transformation.

The rapid changes, from supporting remote work to integrating e-commerce, have led to a digital acceleration of nearly seven years by McKinsey estimates and five years by Forbes estimates. Regardless of how best to estimate the timeframe, this type of organizational growth and forward development is a welcome transformation.

The private sector had to quickly advance its digital shift. Although many businesses did not make it through the pandemic, many of those that did have enabled themselves to survive well into the future thanks through the reworked and improved ways to connect to customers.

The pandemic also brought a spotlight to social inequalities such as gendered employment precarity and the digital divide that many Indigenous, low-income, and rural communities experience. With that spotlight came much-needed funding to tackle these problems through digital development.

Those efforts came as part of a broader prioritization of digital services that has made the world more navigable for people across the board.

Read the full story here on what that transformation has looked like, and what its benefits have been.

Case Study

How Button helped CleanBC overhaul its processes and win an international climate solutions award

The Challenge

The CleanBC Industrial Incentive Program (CIIP) operates under the Province of British Columbia’s Climate Action Secretariat and was established to help B.C. reduce emissions and promote a thriving economy. CIIP faced some very public issues to increase transparency and citizen engagement, to find a way to simplify and automate 6 months of manual efforts on data, and to align with ambitious provincial greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets of 40% by 2030, 60% by 2040, and 80% by 2050.

The task was to create innovative software that would help industry and government efficiently submit, analyze, and report on provincial GHG emissions data.

The Solution

Expertise: Data Science, Web development, UserResearch, UX design

Deliverables: Data Architecture, User Research, UI/UX, Web & DevOps

Technologies: Node, React, Postgres, Python, Perl, C

Working in partnership with the B.C. Climate Action Secretariat, Button was engaged in a process overhaul of the CIIP, a large-scale program that reduces carbon tax costs for facilities that limit emissions.

Armed with the science and the business requirements, we created interactive wireframes of the proposed solution. This allowed users to interact with a prototype the same way they would with an actual software. Being able to see their own feedback as tangible interfaces really helped our end-users hone-in on features they loved and improvements that could be made.

The solution involved evaluating applicants against established 3rd-party sector and product-specific benchmarks. It enabled industry to provide granular geo-referenced emissions data at an Activity/Fuel level for each facility burning taxable fuel in B.C.

The Outcome

Button delivered a solution that condensed 6 months of manual effort into a replicable 30-minute task. This offered a significant and measurable reduction of time spent, and of budget and resources wasted. Over $100 million in value is delivered annually.

The partnership also led to increased transparency of reporting requirements, reduction in the cost of redundant reporting to Industry, and an increase in citizen engagement on climate change and climate policy. This also ensured quality control in data and process, reducing risk of human error and validating data from third parties.

‍Powered by Button, CleanBC went on to win an international award from Under2 Coalition for “most creative climate solution” during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26).

Employee Showcase

Meet Zoey: Service Designer by day, aerialist by night

NAME Zoey LiPOSITION Service DesignerWITH BUTTON SINCE January 2022

Zoey’s a Service Designer by day, collaborating on complex challenges, and an Aerialist by night, doing cool moves in the sky.

Spending most of her life in British Columbia, she’s grateful to be just a drive away from mountains, water and vast greenery. She’s also a traveller, so working fully remote means she can work from home, or by a lake!

Zoey graduated from Simon Fraser University studying Management Information Systems, wanting to be in the social innovation space. At Button, she works in multi disciplinary agile teams with developers/researchers and learns something new from her teammates every day. She also works hand-in-hand with clients (like the Government of British Columbia) to create long-lasting impact. As a Service Designer at Button, she hopes to grow the capacity for service design within organizations and improve design outcomes.

Connect with Zoe on LinkedIn.

Worth Your Attention

What We’re Reading: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

It’s a fiction book about how many people’s lives intersect with each other and—most importantly—with trees. It’s one of those books that makes you remember that everything's connected and that nature is always right there, no matter where you are.

🎯 Join Button next week in Ottawa and online...FWD50 will be in Ottawa and online Nov. 1-3, and features Button’s own Jaimie Park as a keynote speaker! This annual gathering brings together public sector innovators from around the world to answer one vital question: How do we use technology to make society better for everyone?

... and later this week in Edmonton and Victoria

Button is the Silver Sponsor at the Toronto PSN Digital Government & CX Roadshow. Designed to explore the most efficient strategies to help public sector leaders gain internal buy-in and develop a roadmap for digital transformation, we hope you can join us this October to connect with the experts and share ideas to build a better public service. This week, events come to Edmonton on Oct. 27 and Victoria on Oct. 28.

Registration is free for public sector employees.