Following a bitter sponsorship scandal aimed at the spending habits of the Federal Government, The Treasury Board of Canada, Secretariat (TBS) was looking to implement a set of financial applications in order to be able to track previous, current and future expenditures across all Federal Government departments and agencies.

The project involved the creation of four EMIS (Expenditure Management Information Systems) web applications (ARLU, PAA, Estimates, EMI) that required advanced front end web UI design within the constraints of Government of Canada's Common Look and Feel (GoC CLF) standards for the intranet.

During the course of 16 months, our team met with clients and end users from various Government of Canada departments in order to assess end user requirements, validate wireframes and finalize the information architecture and interaction designs. We also conducted UI prototype demos to project stakeholders and advised the senior project management team on matters of usability and user experience.

In the end, the team developed the screen prototypes for all four application using a common set of EMIS-wide UI standards created for the purpose of the project. The UI prototyping stream was based on xHTML 1.0 and CSS2, while application development was performed on an ASP.net / Oracle platform.

The screen designs created for the TBS EMIS project ended up pushing the limits of the GoC Common Look & Feel Standards to the intranet, combining a high-quality user interface with a solid technological backend.

The EMIS applications are presently used by the Government of Canada departments and agencies during their day-to-day expenditure management process (budgeting, spending, grants, etc.).