HEALTHCARE · MEMBER WEB PORTAL & APP
Auditing the registration experience before a redesign
Before a portal redesign and a new mobile app shipped, this audit surfaced what was already broken in registration and turned it into a scoped, pre-launch fix list.
01 OVERVIEW
AHC was redesigning its member web portal and building a new member mobile app from scratch. Before either shipped, the team needed to know what was already broken in the current registration experience, and why. As UX Research Lead, I partnered with our Sr. UX Strategist to audit registration across the current web portal, current mobile app, and new web portal design, then turned recurring issues into prioritized recommendations, supporting an org-wide goal to cut registration-related contact center calls by 50%.
My role
- Led a UX audit of registration across the current web portal, new mobile app, and new web portal design, plus login, the home page, and navigation/IA
- Reviewed ticket, call center, and anecdotal feedback with the UX Strategist, sorting issues into three areas: experience & usability, authentication & security, eligibility & plan accuracy
- Synthesized the audit and the Strategist's market research into a recommendation report for the member experience team
- Presented the recommendations to leadership and led effort-vs-impact conversations on experience and communication action items; the Strategist led authentication and account management
02 CHALLENGE
How might we keep the current registration friction from carrying into the new web and mobile builds?
Stakeholders were mid-build and wanted UI/UX recommendations before launch, not after. Any issue that shipped unaddressed would need fixing twice: once in the new build, once in the support tickets that followed.
Goals
- Improve usability so more members complete registration on the first try
- Align registration with UX and accessibility best practices
- Create parallel experiences across web and mobile
- Support long-term retention and engagement
03 APPROACH
Four member types move through registration differently, so no single walkthrough would catch every failure point. I audited four: self-registration, dependent registration, authorized-party registration, and multi-member household registration.
| Step | Activity | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Reviewed IS ticket data with the UX Strategist, alongside her market research | Ground the audit in real pain points, not assumptions |
| 02 | Ran a heuristic evaluation of registration and adjacent screens | Surface usability and accessibility gaps |
| 03 | Built a report structured as problem → insight → recommendation | Make each issue traceable back to evidence |
04 FINDINGS
Audit results and anecdotal feedback converged on the same three areas, in no particular order, since each represents a different kind of risk: usability, access, and accuracy.
Experience & Usability
Basic usability signals were missing (status cues, plain language, a consistent flow, real-time validation), and it was already costing the business real signups: slow registration was deterring members from creating accounts at all.
Authentication & Security
Neither the current web portal nor the planned mobile app had a real path for authorized-party access, so guardians and household members were being blocked from accounts they had a legitimate right to reach.
Plan Eligibility & Accuracy
The top mobile support ticket, "plan not found," wasn't a bug. 9 of 10 cases came down to members not recognizing a plan's official name.
05 IMPACT
An effort-vs-impact exercise with SMEs and leadership determined what shipped in 2025 versus what moved to the 2026 vision.
- Rollout de-risked — the 2025 list was green-lit, providing the team with a scoped, pre-launch set of fixes instead of shipping first and inheriting the same friction in support tickets.
- Cross-team alignment — business, UX, and dev worked from one evidence-backed reference instead of anecdote. It also shifted perception: UX research could add real analytical value with minimal lift, no user studies required.
- Roadmap clarity — a scoped, effort-weighted roadmap gave leadership what they needed for funding conversations, not an undifferentiated backlog.
Deliverables
- Assessment report: UX audit, ticket analysis, anecdotal feedback, market research
- Recommendation set: 2025 vs. 2026 action items across UX, communication, error messaging, authentication, authorized party, and account management
Next steps
- Test the mobile app beyond registration
- Assess outstanding recommendations against policy and technology constraints
- Test the revised registration flows with member-facing associates
06 REFLECTION
The ticket data and heuristic findings gave the team something it didn't have before: evidence for which problems were structural versus which were fixable in the current build, and license to fix some of them now instead of waiting on the rebuild.
It reinforced how much value comes from consolidating disparate sources to see a problem clearly, from every angle. The audit mattered, but the real richness came from layering it against tickets and anecdotal feedback rather than relying on any single source.
If I could go back, I'd push harder to build in benchmark tracking: current- and future-state metrics to verify whether the new portal actually solved the legacy issues, especially registration completion rates and call center volume, and to catch new problems as they surfaced. Some of that data likely already exists somewhere in the org. Tying it into the assessment and the requirements conversation up front would have made the impact easier to prove, not just predict.