Personae and journey map creation for citizens, employees and partners in the assistance measure

Context

The Curateur public du Québec is a government institution responsible for protecting the rights and interests of vulnerable citizens who are unable to manage their own affairs. Its assistance measure involves five distinct groups of stakeholders: citizens needing help, citizens helping, employees, partners such as notaries and legal advocates who interact with the system on behalf of their clients or on behalf of the organizations and partners (companies, ministries or organisms) with whom the helping citizens will interact with. Understanding how each of these groups actually experiences the service was not a simple task. The journeys are long, sometimes emotionally charged, and involve multiple touchpoints across legal, administrative, and human dimensions. Contrary to the normal citizens that the Curateur normally interacts with, every citizen must be fit to take their own decisions.

The Challenge

The organization had existing satisfaction data suggesting that clients were generally pleased with the service. On the surface, things appeared to be working. But satisfaction scores alone rarely tell the full story and leadership recognized that a deeper, more grounded understanding of the lived experience of all stakeholders was needed to guide future service improvements.
I was mandated to map those experiences in detail: to identify friction points, unmet needs, and opportunities for improvement across the full ecosystem of the assistance measure.

The Approach

Rather than starting from scratch, I began by partnering with an internal subject-matter expert who had deep institutional knowledge of the existing processes. This gave the research a solid and accurate foundation, grounded in how the service was designed to work.
From there, I moved outward by conducting field research directly with citizens, notarial and legal advocates, and all employees types directly or indirectly involved. These conversations were essential. They revealed how the service was actually experienced, as opposed to how it was intended to function.
Over the course of the mandate, this combined approach allowed me to develop a rich, multi-perspective picture of the assistance measure. One that no internal data alone could have produced.

What We Found

The most significant finding was hiding in plain sight.
The organization’s satisfaction surveys consistently returned high scores, yet internal knowledge suggested the service experience was more complex than those numbers implied. The research revealed why: satisfaction was real, but it meant very different things depending on who was answering. Three distinct helping citizen profiles emerged from the field research, each with a fundamentally different relationship to the service.
Some citizens came to the assistance measure already supported by an organizational or institutional framework. The measure was an added layer of protection rather than a primary resource, so their expectations were modest and largely met. Their satisfaction was genuine, but it said little about the service itself.
Others had encountered real friction in trying to use the service, yet remained satisfied for a different reason entirely. The assistance measure provided them with official recognition as a caregiver or protector of a family member and that recognition carried deep emotional weight. It made them feel legitimate, secure, and validated in their role. That symbolic value was enough to generate satisfaction, even when the practical experience had fallen short. Importantly, many of these citizens held misconceptions about what the measure actually guaranteed, mixing the understanding of their role as one of a tutor, when it did not.
A third group experienced the friction without that emotional reframing and their dissatisfaction was clear and direct.
The result was a satisfaction score that aggregated three completely different realities into one misleadingly positive number. High scores had been masking unmet needs, misunderstood expectations, and a significant gap between what citizens believed the service provided and what it actually delivered. The surveys weren’t wrong, but they weren’t asking the right questions.
This finding gave the organization something its own data could not: a human explanation for a contradiction it already sensed but couldn’t articulate.

The Deliverables

The research resulted in a comprehensive set of strategic assets:

• 17 journey maps covering the main interactions and stages of the assistance measure across citizens, employees, and partner perspectives. Each map identifies key moments, friction points, emotional states, and opportunities for improvement.
• Citizen personas representing the diversity of profiles, needs, motivations, and vulnerabilities within the target population. These representations humanize the data and support the design of solutions that are more inclusive and better adapted to real users.
• An integrated service view bringing all journeys and personas together into a coherent strategic foundation designed to guide future service improvements, strengthen the coherence of interventions, and support the development of smoother experiences for all stakeholders involved.

The Outcome

At the conclusion of this mandate, the Curateur public du Québec had something it did not have before: a grounded, field-validated understanding of how its assistance measure is actually experienced by the people it serves. The research did not just confirm what was already known. It challenged assumptions, surfaced hidden gaps, and opened a significant new problem space for leadership to explore. That clarity, the kind that only comes from rigorous, human-centred research, is the foundation on which meaningful service improvement can be built.

Mandate duration: approximately 14 months
Methods: stakeholder interviews, internal expert consultations, persona development, journey mapping
Deliverables: 17 journey maps, citizen personas, integrated service overview
Language of work: French