MYGCPAY HR-TO-PAY PLATFORM
Enhancing employee pay transparency while reducing service bottlenecks
Government of Canada
In 2016, rollout of a new federal Canadian payroll system, called Phoenix, triggered a national crisis: pay inaccuracies and prolonged issue backlogs. What began as a technical rollout failure quickly became a trust collapse.
I was onboarded by IBM to design solutions that restored employee confidence. While I contributed across multiple initiatives, this case study focuses on MyGCPay—a centralized, web platform that made pay information interpretable and case resolution more transparent.
Pay support existed on paper, but in practice the path to resolution was opaque. Employees were left to identify and escalate their own pay problems, navigating between portals, documents, policies, and processes.
Public scrutiny continued to put increasing pressure for change.
At the same time, compensation and call centre teams were overloaded by repeat inquiries, many of which were driven by uncertainty rather than new information. Employees continued to ask:
“Am I being paid correctly, and is anyone doing anything about it?”
Designing MyGCPay was not a blank-slate exercise. The solution had to operate within a highly constrained ecosystem shaped by policy, legacy infrastructure, and public accountability.
This meant developing a transparency layer that sits over existing systems that consolidates data and guidance for self-service. The dashboard would be high impact, low risk, and faster to ship.
Led discovery + aligned stakeholders through scoping workshops
Owned IA + interaction model for the manager dashboard
Defined additional component specs + edge cases for delivery
Facilitated service blueprint + roadmap alignment
Staff at call centers, compensation centers, and HR departments had limited visibility and conflicting priorities. To meet the urgent demand for results, I used a lean and collaborative approach to validate my designs and get stakeholder buy-in.
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Over two years of design work went into shaping the MyGCPay dashboard and its supporting pages. Here’s a look at some of the key features we brought to life:
Over two years of design work went into shaping the MyGCPay dashboard and its supporting pages. Here’s a look at some of the key features we brought to life:
Employees can now stay on top of their pay across overlapping acting positions in one consolidated view. They have access to pay breakdowns and past earnings — something they had to previously track on their own.
The two-step triage of processing pay issues has become more transparent to users. Employees can now follow their inquiry from submission to escalation, seeing exactly when it transitions into an active case.
With data approvals happening in phases, we designed the UI to evolve in phases too. A bento-style layout let us ship early and scale responsibly — adding and rearranging cards as datasets were approved and validated through testing.
Previously, important information was buried deep within web portals and across several pages. With this new design, employees can quickly navigate to information with less keystrokes.
As teams rotated and delivery evolved, the risk wasn’t the interface — it was losing design intent. We created continuity guidelines capturing logic, accessibility requirements, and edge cases to preserve experience integrity beyond handoff.
A collaborative roadmap aligned managers and compensation advisors, leading to contract extension and anchoring MyGCPay within their operational workflows. These efforts led to continuous partnership down the road.
When MyGCPay rolled out to 330,000 federal employees, it changed the day-to-day experience from guessing to knowing. Its launch contributed to the reduction of pay-related tickets across the public service.
More importantly, it earned genuine user support, echoed in national coverage and social posts!
This was my first time leading design at this scale, where AI and governance had to coexist. I learned to design guardrails, define escalation paths, and ship responsibly.
