Jordana Globerman
PRODUCT DESIGN & STRATEGY
Transforming the Government of Canada's collaboration portfolio.
Directing two parallel UX mandates — reimagining a 2017-era social platform and rescuing a flagship product launched without any UX at all — across the government's suite of national collaboration tools.
PROBLEM
One portfolio. Two products in completely different states.
GC Tools is the Government of Canada's portfolio of collaboration platforms, built to help public servants work across agencies and departments. The pandemic forced a hybrid public service onto these tools almost overnight; usage exploded, and so did expectations.
I was responsible for UX strategy across two of the portfolio's most important products: GCCollab, a 2017-era social platform whose value proposition needed reimagining for how the public service actually works now, and GCXchange, the government's flagship interdepartmental workplace — the largest Microsoft 365 instance in the world — launched in 2021 with huge usability issues.
ROLE
Group Product Manager
I owned Product strategy across this portfolio end to end: building and directing UX teams, setting research and design priorities, aligning management and executive stakeholders, leading developers & QA, creating an aligned policy framework and reporting up to the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Chief Information Office and the Government of Canada's CTO.
In practice, that meant running two very different engagements at once under one strategic umbrella — a forward-looking transformation on one product, an urgent, high-visibility fix on the other — while building both teams largely from scratch.
TEAM & SCALE
4
GCCollab UX & strategy team — designers, researchers, policy analysts
4
GCXchange UX team — designer, researcher, analyst, strategist
12
Embedded support agents, developers & a cloud architect
ADM + CTO
Reported to the CIO's office and the GC's CTO
Across the portfolio I built and directed multiple cross-functional teams: a UX & strategy team of four reimagining GCCollab, and a team of 4 remediating GCXchange alongside client-support agents, developers, and a cloud architect. Findings were reported to the ADM's office and the GC's CTO, and portfolio research was shared externally with Apolitical (UK).
Context & approach
01
One portfolio, two different mandates
The GC Tools suite was built in 2017 to support cross-government collaboration. It included messaging, social platforms, career tools, and a wiki. By 2020, pandemic-driven hybrid work had pushed usage far past what it was designed for. I was brought in specifically to build the first dedicated UX function for this portfolio and fix two unrelated problems at once:
Product 01 / GCCollab
STATE
A 2017-era social collaboration platform with clear usability and content debt.
NEEDED
Strategic vision. Tech debt reduction. Design overhaul.
Product 2 / GCXchange
STATE
A national flagship on Teams + SharePoint, launched with one round of one-click testing.
NEEDED
Urgent testing and triage to be usable at all.
02
GCCollab — reimagining a legacy platform
I started by aligning management through visioning workshops, rethinking the platform's value proposition, surfacing pain points, and agreeing on goals, a delivery timeline my team could be held to, and design standards we'd use to evaluate our own output.
Research ran in two passes. First, a refresh of personas for DE&I groups and hybrid-work realities, paired with a heuristic evaluation of every major page that surfaced nearly 70 violations, and a content audit that found significant outdated and duplicated content. Second, generative research — surveys, moderated card sorting, and interviews across public servants, students, private-sector users, and NGO partners — to define what searchability, findability, accessibility, and modern collaboration features actually needed to look like.
That became site maps, user flows, and high-fidelity Figma prototypes, stress-tested with developers and users and revised against real engineering constraints — when a needed platform engine wasn't ready, we shipped interim navigation and labeling fixes rather than waiting.
BEFORE
Legacy GCcollab home — dense, dated, hard to scan.
AFTER
Redesigned, mobile-friendly prototype — clearer IA and modern collaboration features.
03
GCXchange — rescuing a platform at national scale
GCXchange had launched to the entire federal public service with no usability testing behind it. I was hired in 2022 to fix the consequences and build the team that should have existed from day one. We ran a full heuristic evaluation of every major page, then usability-tested the two core goals: searching for a community and joining one. The results explained the complaints we'd been hearing:
01
Registration was broken outright for users still on Internet Explorer.
02
Confirmation emails took up to ten minutes — long enough that most users gave up.
03
Not one of eight test users could join a group - the key feature of the platform: GCXchange ran on a separate Microsoft cloud identity from departmental Teams, triggering an unresolvable loop.
Working with the development team, we shipped a script to route users to the correct Teams cloud instance so they could actually access it, redesigned every major page and navigation path around the goals that mattered, and validated with A/B testing. I also built out accessibility testing as a discipline, training developers to test before UAT, becoming the team's accessibility UAT lead, and escalating unresolved issues directly to Microsoft's Accessibility Support team to get them fixed at the platform level.
BEFORE
AFTER
GCXchange homepage, before → after — navigation and content paths rebuilt around real user goals.
Clear call to action↘
Key tasks highlighted;
useless functionality removed↘
Grid improved ↘
Teams access ←simplified
04
Two products. Same job.
GCCollab and GCXchange needed opposite things, one a strategic reimagining, the other triage. However, both depended on the same underlying leadership: building a credible UX function from nothing, getting executive sponsors to trust a research-led process under real timeline pressure, and making hard calls about what to fix now versus what had to wait on engineering or vendor constraints.
Running both in parallel, with the same executive stakeholders, made this a portfolio mandate — not two separate projects. Transform collaboration for the Government of Canada holistically.
METHODS & TOOLS
Generative UX
Visioning workshops
Heuristic evaluation
Card sorting & tree testing
Agile UX sprints
Usability testing
Content audit
Personas
Site mapping & user flows
High-fidelity prototyping
Product roadmapping
Accessibility testing & research
RESULT
A holistic offering with user needs front and center.
GCCOLLAB
Redesigned the legacy site entirely — with clearer Information Architecture, a modern look and feel, added video and group chat, and a mobile-friendly design.
GCXCHANGE
Went from a platform where core tasks failed outright to one used daily by hundreds of thousands of public servants across every federal department, while establishing an accessibility program and escalation path with Microsoft.
BEFORE
50%
of users could find the community they were looking for when searching.
0%
of users could successfully join a community.
AFTER
75%
of users could find the community they were looking for when searching.
100%
of users could successfully join a community.