Building trust into a regulated claims workflow

Before this, Admin Online had no claims management. A small admin team tracked hundreds of sensitive financial claims across spreadsheets, Word docs, personal notes, and manual handovers — standard cases running 3 months, complex ones up to 6 months.

The real challenge wasn't digitizing the workflow — it was building enough structure, visibility, and confidence that teams would stop managing the same work outside the system.

Each claim touched multiple people, teams, documents, approvals, and regulated decisions, with no single source of truth for status, claimant info, or audit history. For the business that was compliance risk; for admins, duplicated tracking and slow handovers.

I led design end to end: discovery, workflow mapping, IA, UX, UI, and stakeholder alignment across product, operations, engineering, claim administrators, and fund stakeholders.

Build one source of truth first

The MVP created the first structured claims experience inside Admin Online: claim dashboard, claim detail, claimant profile, document area, and case workflow management.

Administrators could finally record, manage, view, and track claim activity in one place, tied to the member account — instead of chasing it across disconnected files.

Follow the workarounds, not the roadmap

After launch, I observed and interviewed administrators. Centralizing wasn't enough: because parts of the process were still manual, users kept duplicating data entry, running spreadsheets alongside Admin Online, and building extra peer-review trackers.

“It wasn't an adoption issue. It was a trust issue.”

7 stages, ~60 steps, 3 pain points mapped post-launch

ConfidentNeutralFrustrated

NotificationNtfy

ContactCntct

DocumentsDocs

AssessmentAsmt

ReviewRvw

PaymentPay

FinalizationFinal

In a regulated workflow, users feared mistakes — so they built their own checks outside the system. The next opportunity wasn't more screens. It was smarter automation.

Automate the highest-friction path

I identified three follow-up opportunities and shipped the first: claim notification automation. Previously it took 2 people and ~1 hour of manual updates.

The new flow reduced it to 1 person entering a single date, with 8 downstream tasks — account updates, insurance changes, transaction controls, online access — automated by the system.

Single date entry

Outcome

Processing dropped from ~1 hour to ~1 minute.

The work showed the team that a workflow system only becomes valuable when people trust it enough to stop rebuilding their own controls outside it.

I design complex B2B and financial-services products that turn operational complexity into clear, scalable experiences. Got a similar problem? Get in touch