As CIPO pivoted its Patent eServices in order to respond to COVID pressures, they've engaged Ampli2de™ to assist in setting up a service experience design team focused on the department's modernization planning horizon. We took the lead of the Patent Strategic Discovery initiative - a multidiscplinary collaboration among design, business analysis, policy, lines of business and IT - and worked closely with CIPO internal and external users to capture the many different, nuanced needs required to inform the modernization of CIPO's services and IT systems.

Ampli2de™ contributed to the shift in CIPO’s strategic planning approach from using exclusively public opinion research to adopting an evidence-based decision making and prioritization process based on user research, service prototyping and co-creation with end-users. As a result, CIPO has embraced the generative research methods (interviews, persona workshops, contextual inquiries, job shadowing) we've introduced and has used those insights to inform the design phase of its next-generation patent and trademark services.

Instead of validating designs through surveys and show-and-tell booths showing static images, CIPO has embraced co-creation, validation, and usability testing of interactive prototypes as the primary way of validating hypotheses and measuring product and service design improvements.

We planned, recruited for, and conducted 112 interviews with patent agents, clerks, pantent operations managers, patent examiners, classifiers, operations analysts, patents appeal board members, finance clerks, etc.

At the conclusion of our research, we created a persona family consisting of 23 external and internal persona profiles, corresponding to the archetypes of patent agent firm and CIPO employees involved in the patent lifecycle.

In order to understand the current state of affairs, our team has co-facilitated the creation of service catalogues corresponding to every type of services available at CIPO.

We've had the opportunity to redesign the entire set of paper and digital certificates offered by CIPO, including matching cover pages and envelope sleeves.

Our team co/facilitated a variety of co-creation and validation workshops, service design process workshops, ideation workshops, and persona validation workshops that were instrumental in the service redesign process.

From service design methodology, to introductions to user research and user experience design, Ampli2de™ has trained CIPO management and CIPO service design team members on the approaches that were undertaken in the project.