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The Self-Service Portal for Combined Insurance (A Chubb Company) is the primary destination for policyholders to manage their coverage — paying bills, reviewing benefits, filing claims, and tracking status. Yet for many, the journey ended before it began.

More than half of registration attempts failed, locking customers out of every other self-service feature.

As the lead UX/UI designer, I partnered with our Director of Customer Experience and Product Owner to understand why, then led the redesign to remove friction, bring the interface up to modern design standards, and navigate unforeseen obstacles to deliver a solution on time and in scope.

Following the deployment, successful registrations saw an immediate 4% increase, translating to 400 more users. To move the needle further, we are now finalizing the deployment of FullStory to analyze user behavior and inform future UX enhancements as we await critical back-end architectural solutions.

The reality we uncovered

Our discovery effort combined stakeholder interviews, call center insights, and journey mapping. We spoke with people across IT, claims, enrollment, marketing, and customer support to understand both the technical and human sides of the problem.

The numbers from Google Analytics told part of the story: 53.8% of attempts failed. The qualitative insights we gathered told the rest. 

Confidence evaporated quickly when customers hit errors they didn’t understand. One-time passcodes sometimes never arrived. Messages didn’t explain what to do next. Frustrated users often abandoned the process entirely — some even canceling their policies.

“Lots of people call in to cancel because they can’t register to service their policy.”
– Martha, Customer Service Team Lead

The current registration flow wasn’t just inefficient; it was actively damaging the customer relationship.

Two design cycles behind

The portal’s framework was so outdated that our developers couldn’t use components from the design system UI kit, and the current front-end visuals were two design cycles behind — still using branding from before the 2022 refresh and lacking the newer digital design system standards that govern everything from responsive breakpoints to interaction states.

Patching the existing experience would only add to the inevitable tech debt, so we proposed a full modernization to the development team, aligning the registration flow with current standards.

This approach also let us draw on proven design elements, from micro-interactions (e.g. button states) to macro-interactions (e.g. selecting a way to receive a one-time passcode), that had already been tested for usability and accessibility.

The promise — and gap — in code reuse

At the same time, our global design team was building a new standardized login framework for all platforms. If we could align with it, we might be able to reuse their work for registration and reduce development effort.

I facilitated discussions between our portal development team, product leadership, and the global design system team to explore the idea. Initially, the answer was encouraging — the new framework was flexible and could be customized.

But as we dug deeper, we uncovered two blockers:

1. The framework wouldn’t be ready in time for our launch
2. It didn’t include any registration functionality at all.

This was a valuable discovery: it surfaced a missing piece in the global solution, and it confirmed that for our project, we’d be starting from scratch.

Changing the way we built

The development team was new to our design system and accustomed to working in silos, surfacing builds only late in the process. That approach risked mismatches between design and implementation.

I introduced a new collaboration model:

• Twice-weekly office hours for real-time feedback.
• A dedicated channel for quick design questions.
• Ad hoc reviews throughout the sprint to catch issues early.
• Onboarding to our design system documentation so developers could self-serve.

This kept the build aligned with design intent, and ensured every component — from spacing to interaction states — matched the new standards exactly.

The result

Even without the shortcut of reusing global code, we launched the redesigned registration experience on time and in scope. The new flow aligned with modern design standards, reduced confusion, and provided clearer guidance for users. It also introduced a collaboration model that’s now being used on other portal projects.

And by surfacing the registration gap in the global login framework, we influenced the direction of a future enterprise-wide solution.

Early signs of impact

Our discovery made it clear that the most severe failures stem from back-end data and technical architecture — issues outside the scope of this release. That insight gave stakeholders a clear roadmap for where system-level changes are most urgently needed.

Within the scope of what could be addressed through UX and UI, our redesign:

• Combined identification steps into one screen, allowing users to try another method (phone, SSN, policy ID) without restarting.
• Added guidance on where to find key details like policy numbers, tailored to different customer types.
• Introduced FAQs and helper text to clarify how to enter names and other information that must match policy records exactly.
• Improved error messaging and validation so users understand what went wrong and how to fix it.
• Updated visual design and layout to align with current standards and reduce clutter.

Usability testing confirmed these improvements: users were more confident navigating the process and better able to complete steps that previously caused avoidable abandonment. The front-end is now positioned to deliver full value once back-end fixes are in place.

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In 2023, Chubb set a goal to grow Workers’ Compensation insurance premiums. Multi-location policies—often higher in premium—were a key opportunity, but quoting them was slow and confusing. Agents had to capture details for multiple states and locations in one policy, and the current process wasn’t built for it.

Feedback was clear:

• Agents and brokers called it confusing and inefficient.
• Business Development Managers heard the same from the field.
• Customer support fielded regular calls from agents stuck mid-quote.

As the lead UX/UI designer for the project, I led all research and design efforts that helped our team collaborate on a solution that was intuitive and scaleable across experiences.

Identifying the Problem

An audit of the experience revealed a broken information architecture. Agents entered state-level details for one state, jumped to another, then circled back to finish location-level details for the first. This disrupted their workflow, forced unnecessary context switching, and made progress hard to track.

We saw two immediate needs:

1. Re-sequence the flow to handle all locations within a state before moving on.
2. Provide constant orientation so agents always knew where they were, what was next, and what was complete.

The new design system, incepted in 2022, lacked a pattern for this kind of progression. The existing Horizontal Progress Tracker was built for indicating simple, high-level stages of a flow. It couldn’t display a full address, offer the necessary interaction states, or handle overflow for large policies.

Designing the Solution

We approached the design system team with evidence from our audit, prototypes built for this use case, and early user feedback. Together, we designed an alternate tracker variant that met system standards but expanded functionality.

With a functional prototype in place, we moved into usability testing to validate the approach and uncover opportunities to refine it before rollout.

Usability Testing Led to Changes

We tested the tracker with seven agents who actively quoted Workers’ Compensation policies with Chubb and competitors.

The first iteration did not test as intuitively as anticipated, but agent feedback informed changes that were needed to make the UI clearer, more scalable, and better aligned to their workflow.

We iterated on layouts, states, and overflow behaviors so it could handle small policies to those with many locations, and support non-linear navigation without breaking process integrity.

One unexpected finding was agents’ desire to see and navigate between all locations at a glance. This led to the Quick View dropdown, which lists every location and enables instant navigation while still respecting the quoting flow’s guardrails.

Final Design

The finished tracker variant brought several key improvements:

• Richer labels that display a wider set of information.
• Enhanced UI to better indicate interaction states, including active, complete, disabled, and warning.
• Overflow handling through carousel arrows and a peek-through affordance.
• A clear hierarchy from state to location details.

Executive Engagement

While the Workers’ Compensation redesign was in progress, the pattern caught the attention of the President of Small Commercial, who led this segment of Chubb’s business.

I co-presented with the product owner, highlighting its clarity, scalability, and cross-product potential. Impressed with the work, he approved it as the standard for all multi-location quoting flows and formalized it as an Epic to scale the design across Chubb’s product portfolio.

Why This Matters

This was a UX-led solution born directly from agent pain points and refined through targeted testing. What began as a design gap in one product became a fully validated, design-system-backed pattern adopted across North America Small Commercial.

It’s proof that addressing a focused workflow challenge can influence enterprise standards and elevate experiences at scale.

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Click the Anatomy and Specification documents below to enlarge.

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In 2022, I was a part of the front office of the NFL’s Washington Football Team as we rebranded to the Washington Commanders. I worked closely with our lead editorial producer to strategize improvements to the website for this monumental new chapter in franchise history. NFL websites are content-driven experiences, and we knew 2022 would draw the site’s largest audience ever.

Overwhelmed and lacking confidence

Through seven user interviews, we learned that fans were overwhelmed. They needed a well organized, clean website that was easy to navigate, so that they could be confident in finding all the content that is important to them. We weren’t meeting that need. A site audit revealed an unguided, sprawling Information Architecture and significant opportunities in the heuristics of ‘Consistency and Standards’ and ‘Aesthetic and Minimalist Design.’

Three strategies for reshaping the site

Washington’s website had the most global navigation links of any NFL team (14 links compared to an average of 10.8), and a vast majority of our traffic was mobile (76.1% of all site visits). Evaluating the current state of our website against our users’ needs, we devised three key approaches for improving the site:

• Condensing: Reduce the number of pages to reduce clutter and number of clicks needed to perform tasks and access content.
• Cross-posting: Make it easier for fans to find content based on theme and type, rather than needing to identify the exact hub page where it is housed.
• Common design patterns: Align the Global Navigation menu with standard practices and user expectations across the web.

Tree testing, card sorting, and an ‘Aha’ moment

By limiting the options in the Local Navigation of site sections, we were able to utilize the design system’s menu components more effectively, offering mobile users a faster navigation experience. 

While conducting tree testing and card sorting to inform this condensing strategy, we had the exciting realization that by placing content in multiple logical locations we could:

1. Increase the chances of users finding what they were looking for effortlessly.
2. Align closely with the content strategies of traditional editorial websites and enhance user experience through familiarity.

And thus we stumbled upon our cross-posting strategy.

A new menu organization

As the first and only UX designer at the organization, I had to navigate a legacy of business-driven decisions that had cluttered the site’s global menu over time.

To tackle this, we implemented a common design patterns strategy specifically differentiating between Content Navigation and Utility Navigation. By applying these patterns, we created a more intuitive and familiar experience for users while also benefiting the business.

For example, the ‘Tickets’ link—a critical revenue driver—was originally located on the right side of the desktop menu bar, traditionally reserved for Utility links. We instead placed it as the very first link on the left side of the bar. This prominent position appropriately grouped the link within Content Navigation, and moved it above the fold for mobile’s vertical menu—crucial, being that 61.6% of all traffic for the ‘Tickets’ page was mobile. It was a win for the users, and a win for the business.

Improved interactions with the website

These design strategies led to a 55% reduction in navigation links on the targeted areas of the site. These streamlined paths through the website offered fans a significantly easier experience interacting with content during a time of heightened interest and attention, and created a successful blueprint for future site changes and enhancements.