Collaboration
Portal
Empowering Clients Through Seamless Risk Management
As the Lead Principal UX Designer, I spearheaded the design and UX strategy for the Client Collaboration Portal — a secure, self-service digital hub that empowers clients and brokers with 24/7 access to critical risk, policy, and claims information.
The portal was a multi-year, multi-phase initiative designed to streamline client workflows, enhance collaboration, and reduce operational friction for the organization’s client services teams, while maintaining the highest standards of data security and mobile accessibility.
I led a cross-functional team of 5 designers and 2 researchers, working closely with product owners, engineering, client services, and security stakeholders across 23 interconnected products & features.
Background
For over 180 years, this company has been an engineering focused, who also happens to provide insurance for the engineered locations that they have helped fortune 500 clients build across the world.
The company helps clients identify their biggest risk, and creates a plan to help them become more resilient. They do this by having field engineers visit the site locations and conduct a full appraisal.
When the client is in the process of addressing the items given to them by the field engineer, the exchange of documents and sensitive information, historically, were being conducted in a non-secure fashion.
Before the portal, client and broker interactions were fragmented across emails, PDFs, and manual communication channels. This led to frequent delays in accessing risk assessments, certificates, and claims updates.
The burden on internal teams grew unsustainable, as internal service teams spent increasing time managing document requests and follow-ups rather than delivering strategic value.
Security was a major concern: sensitive documentation often traveled through unsecured email exchanges, risking data breaches and compliance issues.
Meanwhile, clients lacked real-time visibility into the status of their claims, policies, and recommended risk mitigation actions, leaving them frustrated and disconnected from their resilience goals.
It was clear that the organization needed to modernize — not just to improve efficiency, but to deepen trust and partnership with clients.
The opportunity
“Build a secure, intuitive, always-on platform that could enable self-service for clients and brokers — reducing dependencies and enabling internal service teams to focus on value-added advisory services”
Senior Product Owners, Business Stakeholders and XD saw an opportunity to design a secure, intuitive, always-on platform that would allow clients and brokers to self-serve their key needs — from accessing risk reports to managing policy renewals — reducing dependencies on manual support and enabling internal teams to focus on value-added advisory services.
At its core, this portal would deliver a new standard of transparency, collaboration, and empowerment for our client base.
The objective
The portal’s success would be measured by how well it delivered on two fronts: internal operational efficiency and client empowerment.
Primary Goals:
Improve communication and task tracking between clients and field engineers to help reduce the clients risk
Align client workflows with the company’s broader resilience strategy
Create a flexible/scaleable UI that could support a wide range of role types who have a variety of motivations.
Key Success Metrics
To build the right solution, we first had to deeply understand both client and internal workflows.
Partnering with our research team, we conducted client interviews, and shadowed our field engineers while they attended their routine field visits.
Additionally, we did deep dive into the business process of how the risk mitigation workflow, and documented journey maps of the existing areas, Claims, Certificate Access & Policy Renewals.
Through this discovery, we surfaced three critical friction points:
- A delayed feedback loop between site visits and follow-up actions
- Poor visibility into risk item statuses and ownership
- Unclear & inconsistent means of handoffs between clients, engineers, and client services teams
These insights became the foundation for our personas, task flows, and collaboration models.
With research in hand, I facilitated visioning workshops to define the portal’s MVP and long-term roadmap. We applied service design methodologies (blueprints, systems mapping) to connect the dot between the clients interactions to the internal operational processes.
Early concepts were built in Figma and validated with stakeholders weekly through lightweight feedback loops to ensure alignment and quick iteration.
UX strategy centered around three core design principles:
Clarity
Provide clear, immediate visibility into site visit outcomes, risk items, and recommended actions.
Accountablity
Ensure task ownership was transparent, with clear assignments, deadlines, and notifications.
Consistency
Create a unified visual language across field, client, and internal user experiences.
Every Sprint brought iteration
From the start, our goal wasn’t just to create another portal — it was to build an experience that felt natural, empowering, and truly useful for both clients and internal teams. Every design decision was anchored to the idea of reducing friction and building trust at every interaction.
We started by designing a modular dashboard that would adapt dynamically based on user role — whether a client checking site visit reports, a broker managing certificates, or a field engineer tracking follow-up actions. The challenge was balancing personalization with consistency: users needed tailored views without feeling like they were navigating a different platform every time.
One of our early pivots came from usability testing insights: clients didn’t just want a list of tasks — they wanted clear status tracking and visual confirmation that progress was being made. We introduced status badges, risk heatmaps, and recommendation timelines to give users immediate feedback on where things stood, without hunting through endless pages.
We also knew collaboration had to move beyond email. That led us to integrate in-platform annotations and discussion threads attached to risk items, giving teams a secure, centralized place to align actions and resolve questions faster.
Of course, not every idea made it to final launch. We tested early concepts like gamified dashboards and proactive notification bots but scaled them back after client feedback pointed to a need for simplicity over novelty. That’s something I strongly believe in — great UX often means knowing what not to include.
By the end, we weren’t just delivering designs — we were delivering clarity, confidence, and control back into the hands of our users.
Building the Client Collaboration Portal wasn’t just a design challenge — it was a cross-team orchestration effort that required tight alignment between UX, product management, engineering, client services, and business stakeholders.
From the beginning, I made it a priority to create clear communication channels between teams. I put together design briefs aligned to sprint goals, making it easy for engineering to anticipate UX needs and minimize last-minute surprises. These briefs outlined user flows, edge cases, error states, and interaction priorities — not just high-fidelity screens.
To keep the momentum strong, I established weekly design syncs where designers, engineers, and product owners could review work in progress, raise blockers early, and ideate openly. Instead of handing off work over the wall, we created a collaborative feedback loop that sped up decision-making and kept technical feasibility front of mind during design iterations.
I also participated actively in backlog grooming and roadmap prioritization sessions with product managers. By having UX at the table early, we were able to scope features realistically, advocate for user needs during tradeoff discussions, and identify opportunities to build scalable solutions that would pay dividends across multiple products.
One of my proudest contributions was successfully advocating for the portal’s inclusion in the company’s quarterly OKRs. By tying UX outcomes directly to business metrics — such as task completion rates and client engagement — we secured leadership buy-in and positioned the portal not just as a project, but as a strategic pillar of the company’s modernization goals.
At every stage, collaboration wasn’t just a process — it was a philosophy: bringing together the right people, at the right time, to build something bigger than any one team could achieve alone.
The portal pilot launched across 10 key client accounts — and the results spoke for themselves.
Within just a few months, we saw a 30% reduction in task completion delays, empowering clients to address risk recommendations faster and with greater confidence. Visibility into open risk items improved by over 60%, eliminating the communication black holes.
Clients and brokers praised the portal’s clarity and accessibility, noting how easy it was to track progress, manage claims, and retrieve certificates without endless follow-up emails. Internally, client service teams reported significant time savings, allowing them to shift focus from administrative tasks to higher-value advisory roles — exactly the transformation we had envisioned.
Perhaps most importantly, the platform was no longer seen as just a support tool — it became a strategic pillar of the organization’s modernization efforts. Leadership recognized the portal as a flagship model for how digital platforms could drive client success, operational efficiency, and business growth simultaneously.
The project didn’t just improve a workflow — it changed the relationship between the company and its clients, establishing a new standard for trust, transparency, and collaboration.
Looking back, this project was more than just a portal redesign — it was a career-defining opportunity to lead complex UX at scale and drive real organizational change.
Designing for both clients and internal teams meant constantly shifting perspectives. I had to navigate the dual mindsets of field engineers on the ground and executives at the top, all while ensuring that the final experience felt seamless and intuitive for end users. It deepened my ability to design for multiple mental models, and to advocate for UX decisions that served the big picture — not just the immediate UI.
This project also challenged me to step fully into strategic design leadership. I wasn’t just creating wireframes; I was aligning cross-functional teams, managing expectations, prioritizing trade-offs, and helping teams see design not as a phase, but as a driver of impact. That shift — from designer to strategic partner — was one of the most fulfilling parts of the entire experience.
Perhaps what I’m most proud of is how the work extended beyond the interface. I mentored junior designers, contributed to the evolution of our design system, and helped shape how the organization approaches digital transformation. The lessons I took from this project — about influence, systems thinking, and scaling clarity — continue to shape how I lead today.
Visuals shown in this case study are conceptual recreations and do not disclose proprietary data, client information, or internal system architecture.
If you have any questions regarding this project please feel free to reach out to me using the mediums below.