CIPO: Digital IP Education Toolkit

Context

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) serves over 250,000 visitors annually, ranging from entrepreneurs and independent inventors to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). These users come with diverse needs: some are brand new to the concept of IP, while others are scaling their businesses globally.

As part of a government-wide Web Renewal initiative, CIPO set out to create an interactive learning tool that could help users navigate their unique IP journeys, connect them with the right resources, and empower them to make informed decisions about protecting and leveraging their intellectual property.

The IP Awareness and Education (IPAE) module was the pilot project — the first step in reshaping CIPO’s digital presence.

Scope & Scale

This project was scoped as a five-month engagement, spanning from initial conceptualization to delivery of the final online product. The timeline included:

• Executive and stakeholder alignment on the vision and scope of the tool.

• Problem discovery and fact-finding, clarifying what barriers Canadian innovators face in navigating IP resources.

• Initial research in the form of stakeholder interviews, heuristic evaluations, and proxy usability testing.

• Design execution: creating interactive, low-fidelity prototypes that were not only user-friendly and accessible, but also compliant with Canada.ca accessibility standards.

The initiative involved close collaboration with three IP advisors, multiple managers from separate teams, and representatives from the Customer Support Centre. Importantly, this project also required breaking down long-standing silos between departments to ensure that resource alignment and navigation could finally be unified.

At present, the toolkit is in its final stage of development and testing. While direct user-facing metrics are not yet available, the solution has received strong endorsement from stakeholders, product owners, and content leads, all of whom have approved and lauded the new design direction. Early projections anticipate an uptick in visitors and a measurable reduction in support centre reliance.

Constraints & Challenges

A central challenge was that I could not conduct direct end-user interviews due to legal restrictions. To mitigate this, I employed a combination of proxy research strategies:

• Persona validation workshops to validate assumptions about user types.

• Internal shadowing of advisors to observe real-world patterns of user support.

• Proxy interviews with IP Advisors and client support agents to map common pain points and recurring user needs.

Another key challenge was the compressed timeline. Five months to research, design, test, and hand off a national-level toolkit left little room for a conventional end-to-end UX cycle. The solution was to establish novel UX workflows that respected best practices while adapting to reality.

For example, instead of waiting for high-fidelity prototypes, I delivered interactive low-fidelity prototypes early. This allowed stakeholders to experience the navigation and information architecture firsthand while ensuring I could maintain a close, agile collaboration with the development team to safeguard usability through implementation.

This pragmatic approach balanced rigour with speed, ensuring quality outcomes within non-negotiable deadlines.

The Process

The toolkit was designed as a progressive guidance system: orienting, diagnosing, recommending, and connecting users to the right support at the right stage.

1. Orientation

The experience opens with a concise explanation of how the toolkit works, setting expectations and grounding users in the IP journey framework. This framing helps reduce entry friction and establish a mental model: that navigating IP is a staged progression, not a one-off action.

2. Diagnostic Placement

A three-question diagnostic quickly identifies where a user falls within the IP journey. These questions, co-developed with content owners and iteratively refined, act as a triage mechanism—delivering actionable guidance without creating form fatigue.

This reflects adaptive learning design principles: instead of rigid categorization, the diagnostic situates users relative to their journey stage, enabling scalable personalization.

3. Central IP Toolkit

Based on diagnostic results, the toolkit surfaces the most relevant resources from the IPAE department’s extensive repository, which includes:

• Factsheets

• Education modules

• Podcasts

• Case studies

• Blog posts

Each resource was scored and weighted against the diagnostic framework to ensure dynamic curation. This reduced cognitive overload by avoiding “resource dumping” and instead employed a progressive disclosure model—the right content, at the right time, for the right user.

4. IP Ecosystem (Geo-Mapping Service)

Recognising that users often need external expertise, the toolkit integrates a geo-mapping service that helps users connect with:

• IP lawyers

• Consultants

• Registered IP groups and organizations

The design distilled this discovery process into three intuitive categories:

• Expertise (knowledge-based help)

• Support (organizational or structural assistance)

• Funding (financial pathways)

These categories were validated through robust testing and interviews with IP advisors, ensuring they aligned with real-world mental models and reduced navigational ambiguity.

5. IP Academy

To extend engagement beyond static content, the IP Academy module was built to showcase live and interactive learning opportunities—from seminars to webinars to in-person training. Users can register directly through the platform, enabling seamless participation and fostering long-term engagement with the IP learning ecosystem.

Why This Matters

By structuring the toolkit around diagnostic assessment, contextualised resource delivery, and ecosystem integration, the design elevated a sprawling content library into a personalized, navigable learning system. Instead of facing a wall of undifferentiated resources, users now experience a guided journey that feels tailored to their business maturity, legal knowledge, and geographic context.

This decision architecture not only increases findability and relevance but also reduces cognitive load, ensuring innovators can focus on their ideas, not on deciphering government websites.

Design Deliverables

Throughout the process, I produced artifacts that made the invisible decision architecture visible for stakeholders:

• Paper sketches for rapid ideation.

• Interactive low-fidelity Figma prototypes for clickable, dynamic navigation demonstrations.

• A feature prioritization matrix, plotting importance vs. implementation effort, to align stakeholders on phased delivery.

• Information architecture models embedded directly into the prototypes, allowing managers and advisors to experience navigation rather than abstractly debate it.

These deliverables proved critical in building shared understanding and gaining buy-in across siloed teams.

Collaboration & Advocacy

As IPAE’s first major UX-led project, the process also became a platform for advocacy and education. Many stakeholders had not previously encountered usability concepts. This led to stakeholders recognising not just the visible utility of UX, but also the invisible advantages of UX including:

• Understanding why the diagnostic questions needed to be front-loaded with a clear value proposition, to earn user trust before input collection.

• Recognising the impact of line length (70 characters) on saccadic eye movement, and how seemingly minor typographic decisions influence readability and comprehension.

Through these moments, I was able to elevate UX maturity across the organization.

Importantly, my work on the IP Journey Toolkit has set a precedent for future phases of the broader Web Renewal project. Managers and executives now advocate for more robust and detailed UX processes moving forward, demonstrating the toolkit’s role as both a product deliverable and cultural catalyst.

Outcomes & Future Impact

• Stakeholder approval: All content owners, advisors, and managers endorsed the design direction.

• Projected KPIs: Increased visitors, reduced reliance on support centre calls, and improved navigation completion rates.

Organizational impact: Established UX workflows and set a baseline for UX integration into future government digital services.