New and improved CIPO patent web pages

On , the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) launched redesigned versions of many of our patent web pages.

This work supports our commitment of offering a modern, client-centric service experience through e-enabled services. Feedback and usability testing of existing content highlighted just how complex our web content was. We found that people were spending too much time looking for the information they needed. They also weren't able to complete their tasks because the content was difficult to understand once (if!) they found it. With this in mind, we restructured and simplified the patent content to help our users accomplish what they came to do. We "optimized" our patent pages.

What is web optimization?

Web optimization is about improving user experience. It aims to make the content easy to find, understand and use. We focused on applying web principles to content and implemented the Government of Canada standard design templates for websites.

What has changed?

You will notice a new look on our patents landing page as well as on many of its subpages.

You might also notice:

  • a reworked menu that highlights topics and most requested links for patent content
  • a new patent home page that acts as a hub for user tasks
  • clearer language for requesting action
  • reworded links, labels and navigation text, and clearer keywords near the start of the text
  • reorganized pages with a step-by-step structure to help provide context to the content
  • pages grouped into tabs to improve navigation and scanning of long and complex content
  • Two screenshots of CIPO's patent landing page, displaying the layout of the page before and after the optimization update.

Why is CIPO optimizing?

CIPO is performing web page optimization for 2 main reasons:

  • To improve our website; which was identified as a key "pain point" by users
  • To comply with the Government of Canada's communications policy that mandates that content needs to be written more plainly and organized according to the Canada.ca design system

Note that not all patent content has been rewritten. Our publications, reports, and notices all stayed the same. Additionally, this patent web optimization applied only to patent content. We will review other content on the CIPO website through additional optimization projects.

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