Member portal rebuild

The challenge

The existing portal was so hard to use that members phoned instead. It failed accessibility checks, took eight seconds to load, and had not been updated in four years.

What discovery found

• Three quarters of calls were two questions: claim status and cover balance
• The portal was unusable by keyboard and invisible to screen readers
• Members abandoned password reset at a very high rate
• Content was locked in a system nobody had access to

The approach

We started from the two questions driving the call volume and designed those answers to be reachable within one screen of signing in. Everything else came second. Accessibility was an acceptance criterion on every ticket rather than an audit at the end.

What we built

• Claim status and cover balance on the landing screen
• Accessible, keyboard-operable throughout
• Simplified identity recovery
• Document upload for claims
• Editable content for the member services team

Security

Session hardening, rate limiting on authentication, encrypted document storage, and strict access scoping to a member's own records.

What went wrong

The legacy claims API could not handle the load and could not be changed. Caching with careful invalidation let us hold response times without touching it.

The result

8s → 1.2s

Time to first meaningful screen

WCAG 2.2 AA

Conformance, from failing

61%

Fewer status enquiry calls