Member Spotlight
- Shannon Farguson
- Ari Hershberg
Welcome to our CHEFS Team Member Spotlight Page
As part of our commitment to transparency and collaboration, we publish bi-weekly Weeknotes to keep users, stakeholders, and partners informed and engaged in all things CHEFS.
For our first edition of the CHEFS Team Member Spotlight, we are introducing Shannon Farguson, a Senior UX Designer on the CHEFS Team.
Q & A
What is your role in BC GOV and what product are you currently working on for the CHEFS team?
As a Senior UX Designer on the CHEFS team, I’m currently working on a Multi-Tenancy Proof of Concept. This initiative enables CHEFS form owners to connect related forms under a common initiative while ensuring security, scalability, and usability.
What’s most exciting about this project is that if our hypothesis proves successful in CHEFS, we can expand multi-tenancy to other common components. This would be a significant win for the BC Government, as it balances shared efficiency, privacy, and customization across multiple systems—not just CHEFS.
What do you like most about working on the CHEFS team?
I like the challenge of simplifying complex concepts into something easy to understand and use. It’s far easier to create something complicated than to distill complexity into clarity— that’s what makes this work so rewarding.
Do you have a favourite failure or apparent failure that has set you up for later success?
I enrolled in a two-year Classical Animation diploma program in the early 2000s. While I didn’t fail at it, I quickly realized I wasn’t great either. Rather than forcing a path that didn’t feel right, I chose to pivot after graduation and explore design instead.
Twenty years later, I’m still in design, constantly learning and growing. Looking back, what felt like a setback at the time was an opportunity to discover a career I truly love.
What is an absurd thing you love?
These are not absurd things to love, but I do absurdly love: my tiny terror of a Dachshund, books and Audible, a dry gin martini, exploring the island as a relative newbie, not having to cook on the daily and finally, my husband and his ability to make an incredible meal out of whatever is in our fridge.
Is there a book or movie that has greatly influenced your life?
As a kid, I loved ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. They sparked two lifelong passions: reading and travel. That love for exploration led me to "choose my own adventure" across Canada for nearly two decades, living and working in almost every province from coast to coast.
