Overview

The Ministry of Labour (MLITSD)’s myEOIS portal is an internal employee portal consisting of a library of documents for Employment Ontario team members. It assists users with navigating the Employment Ontario (EO) portal, including training modules, user guides, and existing resources. We were tasked with improving the searching functionality.

Main Problem

MLITSD observed that myEOIS users are having problems with inaccurate search results produced by the search function when navigating for existing information and resources about EO-related systems.

This caused users to spend too much time searching for relevant results, leading to users becoming discouraged and giving up to use alternatives.

Process

We gathered all stakeholders, performed user interviews, and gained access to the website to see it in action during a “Discovery” phase to better understand how users interact.

Some pain points we noted:

Users spend a lot of time searching through the results, leading to frustration
Search results were inaccurate, most of the time they weren’t specific enough for what they’re looking for
Users needed to change up their keywords multiple times to find specific results
When they can’t find the resource through search, users end up looking for resources manually or contacting coworkers for help
Outdated results were cluttering the screen

Search results of myEOIS. Note the lack of information in each search result. When was it posted? What category is each result?

Solutions

Based on the findings from the user interviews, we worked alongside stakeholders to come up with a feature list to include in the new design:

Improving search functionality by expanding the category filters, add the ability to search based on time, and predictive text