Redesigning a portal built for
‍complexity, and customers

Lincoln Financial's customer portal had become a maze of inconsistent patterns and outdated interactions. I led the navigation and dashboard redesign — streamlining task flows, modernising the interface, and achieving a 45% increase in task completion efficiency

About the Company

Lincoln Financial is a U.S. financial services company helping individuals and families plan, protect, and retire with confidence. Their offerings span life insurance, annuities, retirement plans, and group protection products — with a brand legacy built on integrity and long-term commitment to customers.

Over time, their customer portal had accumulated complexity without cohesion. What should have been a confident, empowering experience had become fragmented — forcing users to work harder than they should to access the tools and information they needed most.

Context

The business challenge

The portal needed to reflect the quality and trustworthiness of the Lincoln Financial brand — while meaningfully improving users' ability to manage policies, check retirement plans, and access account information without relying on customer support.

My involvement

I led the UX and visual design effort: conducting the design audit, synthesising research, defining the new interaction patterns, building the Digital Style Guide in Figma, and delivering a fully tested high-fidelity design ready for development handoff.

The research

User Experience & Visual Design Audit

A UX and visual audit of the existing portal surfaced the root causes — issues that went deeper than surface-level styling and required deliberate architectural decisions to resolve.

the problem

Five structural failures behind the poor experience

01.

Visually dated and cognitively heavy interface

The interface required unnecessary mental effort — an outdated aesthetic compounded by inconsistent typography, spacing, and alignment across the platform.

02.

Navigation that didn't match user mental models

The portal structure didn't align with how users thought about their financial tasks — forcing excessive scanning and creating unnecessary friction at every stage.

03.

Zero Misaligned content hierarchy

Information was organised around internal logic rather than user priorities — burying high-value actions and making routine tasks harder than they needed to be.

04.

Inconsistent interaction patterns

Fragmented visual language across sections — inconsistent colors, button hierarchies, and component behavior — eroded user confidence and made the platform feel unreliable.

05.

No cohesive user journey

Without a unified structure, users lacked a clear path through their tasks — resulting in confusion, over-reliance on customer support, and unnecessary drop-off.

THE Process

Audit first. Design to the evidence.

Every design decision in this project was anchored to something we observed or tested — not assumed. The process moved in deliberate phases, each informing the next.

01.

UX & Visual Audit

I began with a comprehensive audit of the existing portal — mapping usability gaps, inconsistencies in visual language, and structural issues in the navigation. This gave us a clear before-state and a shared baseline for what needed to change. Rather than working from assumptions, every design decision was traced back to a specific finding.
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Key finding: The core problem wasn't aesthetics — it was that the platform's structure didn't match how users think about their financial tasks. Visual improvements alone wouldn't fix it.

02.

Research & Persona Development

Using discovery insights, I developed persona archetypes and mapped journey flows to pinpoint where friction was highest. Qualitative and quantitative usability tests on the overview page — covering task completion, discoverability, user frustrations, and open-ended feedback — gave us both the data and the narrative to drive design prioritisation.
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Research insight: Navigation clarity was the single biggest predictor of task success — users who understood where they were completed tasks; users who didn't, dropped off or called support.

03.

Baseline Usability Testing

Before designing solutions, I ran qualitative and quantitative usability tests on the existing overview page — asking participants to complete tasks around finding key products and services, and gathering open-ended feedback on clarity and satisfaction. This testing defined the benchmark against which the redesign would be measured, and confirmed the audit findings with real user behaviour data.
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Method: Testing before designing ensured the redesign addressed real observed behaviour — not assumptions about what users struggled with.

04.

Brand Application & Digital Style Guide

I translated Lincoln Financial's brand guidelines into a practical Digital Style Guide in Figma — selecting and adapting key brand elements to work at the interaction level: colour, typography, spacing, iconography, and component patterns. Building this as a live Figma library meant changes could be applied consistently across the entire portal, accessibility could be evaluated in context, and the system could be handed off to development with minimal friction.
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Principle: A Digital Style Guide is infrastructure, not decoration — it's what makes consistency achievable at scale, and what allows a redesign to hold up over time.

05.

UI Design & Validation Testing

With the system established, I moved into full UI design — applying the style guide to navigation, dashboard layouts, and key task flows. Final validation testing focused on findability and visibility of key products and services, closely observing how users interacted with iconography, button hierarchy, and content grouping before confirming the direction.
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Validation: 97% of test participants rated page clarity above average — confirming the redesigned structure was working before handoff, not after.

The Solution

Key Features Designed

Streamlined Way-Finding

Redesigned the portal navigation with a clear visual hierarchy, consistent labelling, and reduced structural complexity. Users could now locate key information and complete common tasks — managing policies, checking retirement plans, viewing summaries — without unnecessary steps or backtracking.

Targeted & Personalised Dashboard

Redesigned the dashboard to surface only what's relevant to each user — with contextual descriptions, tooltips, and alerts tailored to their profile. Content and CTAs were prioritised by user need, reducing cognitive overload while guiding users toward task completion independently

Quick Actions Architecture

Prioritised the most common tasks with a streamlined layout that minimises steps to completion. Key actions are immediately accessible, with contextual guidance available without cluttering the primary view.

The impact

Results that validated both the design and the process

+45% Task Completion Efficiency

Users compled key tasks faster following the redesign — driven by clearer navigation and a hierarchy aligned to user priorities.

Reduce Support Dependency

Improved discoverability and self-service capability reduced the need for users to contact support to complete routine tasks.

97% Clarity Rating

Nearly all usability test participants rated the redesigned page design above average for clarity — a strong signal the structural decisions were working.

4/5 Visual Satisfaction

Participants rated the new UI highly for overall look and feel — confirming the brand application felt both modern and trustworthy.

Reflection

In financial services, clarity isn't just a usability goal — it's an emotional one. When users feel oriented and in control, they trust the product. When they don't, they disengage entirely.

This project sharpened my ability to work within the constraints of an established brand while pushing for genuine usability improvements. Translating brand guidelines into a living design system — rather than a set of static rules — was one of the most valuable outcomes of the engagement, enabling the team to move faster and test more confidently throughout the process.

Redesigning a portal built for‍complexity, and customers

Client:

Lincoln Financial

Category:

User Reseach, UI Deisgn, Testing

Tools:

Figma, Maze, Jira