Project Overview
Air Canada was migrating 15-year-old internal systems to the cloud—an opportunity to unify fragmented HR, corporate, and employee travel services. I led the UX to take the portal from 0→1 and collaborated with Team REDx (Reimagined Employee Digital Experience) to make this vision real, starting with an MVP that would prove value quickly while setting the foundation for long-term growth.
Goal: a single, personalized employee portal that reduces friction and surfaces the most-needed tasks fast.
Scope pivot: Mid-project we shifted from “responsive web + app” to a slimmed-down mobile app for MVP. The research, IA, and OKR/KPI framework I led remained the backbone of decisions and allowed us to refocus quickly without losing momentum.
Initiative: Employee portal (0→1)
Timeline: 2025
Role: UX Lead
Tools: Figma, Maze, Tetra Insights, AI-assisted tools
Collaboration: Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Owners, supporting Designers, Engineers, Solutions Architect, and AI team
Goal: Redesign a 15-year-old internal portal into a unified, modern employee experience.
The Challenge
15-year-old legacy system with inconsistent design and fragmented access.
Multiple portals with overlapping functions, creating confusion and inefficiency.
Poor mobile accessibility for a globally distributed workforce.
No clear measurement framework for success.
Our challenge: Design a streamlined, personalized, mobile-first experience that meets both employee needs and business objectives — fast.
My Role & Approach
As UX Lead, I:
Created the UX strategy and roadmap to align design efforts with product goals.
Set OKRs and UX KPIs in collaboration with stakeholders to measure redesign impact.
Integrated AI-assisted tools into my workflow to accelerate research synthesis under aggressive timelines (and as the sole designer at the outset).
Led end-to-end design, from research through prototyping and testing, with constant stakeholder and cross-functional collaboration.
DISCOVERY PHASE
Stakeholder Interviews
We began with an ambiguous vision, so I initiated interviews with key stakeholders to:
Identify common user groups.
Understand their goals, services offered, and operational constraints.
Clarify vision.
Collaboratively establish criteria for choosing the MVP’s target audience.
Outcome: Defined the MVP personas and a prioritized list of feature needs.
Screenshots of working files in Figma, Excel and Powerpoint we used to help bring clarity and alignment with stakeholders.
User Research & Workshops
Seeking assistance from Corporate Communications team, who knew a lot about the company’s population, we recruited employees for:
1:1 interviews to capture user goals, frustrations, and needs.
Workshops to surface content priorities and must-have services.
To meet tight deadlines, I coordinated with other designers who had availability to help run sessions — ensuring richer, faster insights.
Outcome: Listened to employees directly, informing us of their goals, frustrations and needs, which helped us shape what we need to build.
Whiteboard by Corporate Communications listing grouped departments that exist at the company
Interview scripts, workshop activities, and tree-testing using Maze
Analysis & Synthesis
Combined AI-generated summaries with human note-taking to accurately synthesize findings.
Mapped insights into problem spaces, guiding information architecture and content strategy.
Setting OKRs and UX KPIx
When we got a clearer picture of what both stakeholders and users were saying, I initiated team collaboration to set OKRs and UX KPIs to measure the impact of our redesign.
IA & Content Strategy
What helped to determine relevant content and self-serve tools for the portal, were the workshops facilitated while interviewing employees. I found what employees prioritized, as well what corporate and HR information they cared about most. Building a wireframe prototype focusing on content and widgets got the conversation going with my team and cross-functional collaboration to make decisions about what stays, goes and to reconsider, keeping in mind both business and user goals. This was an opportunity to start shaping strategy to that would turn the services to employees.
Calendar heat map brief
Our team generated the idea to introduce a heat map to the homepage date picker calendar.
Question
How might we get more click-throughs from the calendar date picker phase to the Search Results page and possibly convert look to book visits into actual revenue?
KPI’s to measure:
If the current prices on the calendar dates deter a user from looking into booking a flight.
If showing no prices and only colours that indicate high, medium and low prices will affect a user’s choice to click through to the Search Results page.
Generate revenue through to Confirmation page.
Original design of the calendar date picker on Air Canada’s homepage.
Hypothesis
Colour code the calendar dates with a legend to see if it would increase look to book visits, and possibly motivate users to purchase a flight.
Experience A: Colour coded dates with a legend and no price display.
Experience B: Colour coded dates with price display.
Test report
Experience A sustained 82.16% in visits clicking on the calendar.
Experience A produced a click-through rate of 64.75% to the Search Results page.
Experience A held a conversion rate of 3.34% of visits to purchase a flight.
Experience B brought 78.36% in visits.
Experience B reached 60.79%.
Experience B reached 3.32%, overall on average making Experience B a drop of -0.6% over Experience A. In conclusion, Experience A was the winner and became a permanent experience on the website.