Signer Portal Redesign
Senior Sign is a paperless admissions platform for senior living communities. Its signer portal was generating support tickets and customer complaints due to bugs and a confusing user experience. I was brought in to redesign the experience end to end, making it easier for residents and families to complete complex admission paperwork.
TIMELINE
4
Weeks
TEAM
2
Me + Developer
Before
After
The problem
The portal was built around one assumption: one person, one sitting, one device.
Real life was messier. Families shared signing responsibilities, residents returned to unfinished packets, documents were added mid-process, and most users were on mobile devices the experience wasn’t designed for.
The result was a high-friction experience that generated avoidable errors, support tickets, and customer complaints.
The approach
With a 30-day timeline, I combined a usability audit, session recordings, and conversations with Customer Success to identify the highest-impact problems. Their experience working directly with senior living communities helped ground the findings in real-world needs.
Three priorities emerged: design for mobile-first use, make packet progress and navigation more flexible, and prevent errors in high-stakes signing steps.
Solution
Design mobile-first
The majority of signers were using mobile devices, yet the existing experience hadn’t been designed around them. I redesigned the portal with a mobile-first approach, prioritizing clarity, accessible interactions, and a straightforward path through complex admission paperwork for users with varying levels of technical confidence.
Make the packet flexible
I replaced the linear wizard with a packet overview, letting users see outstanding documents, jump between sections, and return to unfinished work without losing their place. The new structure better supported non-linear completion and documents added mid-process; cutting down from 6 rigid steps to 1 entry point.
Before
After
Protect signer identity and consent
Session recordings revealed users overwriting resident details with their own information, sometimes voiding documents and forcing community managers to resend them. I reordered the flow to collect signer details first, then presented resident details as a verification step with editing behind an explicit action.
Before
After
Director of Customer Success, Senior Sign
"Customers love the Signer Portal now. It is simply *chef's kiss*"
Post-launch iterations
Observing real users after launch revealed that some actions still weren’t obvious, particularly for older adults.
Users were missing the hamburger menu, so I replaced reliance on menu discovery with explicit, labelled navigation actions. At the resident verification step, users were also overlooking the inline edit link, so I added a prominent Edit button.
Both changes were driven by observed behavior rather than assumptions about how people would use the interface.
The outcome
The signer portal went from one of the platform’s most complained-about surfaces to being largely off the support queue.
The project also became the first full deployment of the design language system across the platform, replacing hard-coded UI with reusable, documented components.
The redesigned foundation laid the groundwork for a follow-on signer management project, introducing the architecture needed for session-based access control so multiple family members could sign without overwriting one another’s work.