Research at provincial scale: 1,000 Ontarians and the vendors in between

Context and stakes

Over several years I led research and co-design sessions with more than 1,000 Ontarians to find what was failing on Health811 and what residents needed next. Participants included Indigenous communities, Francophone residents, seniors, clinicians, youth, and persons with disabilities. The plan was built on collaborative boards and structured group calls.

My role

I owned that program end to end, and I owned a second, quieter problem alongside it: the quality of research run by partner organizations outside my direct control.

The co-design plan stalled twice. The Francophone group wanted to talk, one voice at a time, which killed parallel capture. First Nations participants were uncomfortable with the technology, and quieter members went unheard.

What I built or changed

We redesigned the sessions live: parallel breakout groups so multiple voices could speak at once, then everyone reconvened and shared what their group found. Quieter participants came through clearly.

The redesign was not a concession on rigour, it was what made the rigour possible. One voice at a time had been quietly discarding the input of everyone still waiting to speak, and the Francophone and First Nations sessions were where that showed first. Running groups in parallel and then reconvening meant the capture problem and the participation problem were solved by the same move.

Vendor research quality

When I arrived, partner run usability sessions were structured in ways that invited agreement rather than evidence: product walkthroughs, explanations of how things worked, then asking participants whether everything made sense. I retrained facilitation toward neutral one on one moderation and removed the bias from the practice.

Outcomes and open threads

The open thread: establishing direct researcher access to sessions as a standard, a change now sponsored at the executive level.