Personify Health · 2022–2024
Redesigning a fragmented admin experience into a unified, member-first tool — giving TPA administrators and brokers a complete picture of every member from a single starting point.
Personify Health's TPA (Third Party Administrator) offering allows employers and brokers to manage their members' health benefits directly through a client admin portal. As the company expanded its TPA services through a platform merger, the admin experience became increasingly fragmented — TPA features existed as isolated functions scattered across the portal, and a separate legacy platform was being deprecated.
I was the sole designer responsible for rethinking how TPA administrators and brokers access and support their members — consolidating everything into a single, unified member management experience built on a member-first foundation.
TPA administrators and brokers are responsible for supporting members through some of their most confusing moments — claims issues, enrollment questions, ID card requests, and benefits clarification. But the tools available to them made this support difficult in two compounding ways.
First, PHI restrictions prevented admins from logging in as a member to see what the member sees — yet they were expected to walk members through their own platform experience. Without a way to mirror the member view, admins were navigating blind.
Second, TPA features were spread across 4–5 disconnected areas of the portal with no unified starting point. Getting a complete picture of a single member required jumping between separate search functions, tabs, and in some cases a legacy platform that was being deprecated. Brokers managing multiple clients faced an additional layer of complexity — accessing members across different client accounts with no streamlined path.
The deprecation of the legacy platform made this urgent: we needed to migrate those capabilities into the current admin, but doing so without a coherent structure would have just moved the mess rather than fixed it.
Conducted a full audit of both the legacy platform being deprecated and the current admin portal — cataloguing every TPA feature, where it lived, and how it was accessed. Interviewed internal stakeholders who configured and supported both platforms, the client management team to understand broker workflows, and conducted direct interviews with brokers to understand how they access and complete actions for members across multiple clients.
Took a step back from TPA specifically to assess the admin as a whole — it had become a crammed space where features accumulated without organization. The IA work wasn't just about where to put TPA features; it was about creating a structure flexible enough to absorb TPA now and wellbeing features in the future. This meant introducing a clearer organizational model and standardized design system components so any future additions would follow a consistent pattern.
Prototyped each individual feature building off the core concept: a holistic member view accessed from a single consolidated search. Collapsed enrolled and non-enrolled member searches into one. Designed an admin view that mirrors what members see on their own platform, with additional admin-specific actions and permissions layered on top. Iterated through multiple rounds with brokers at key milestones.
Shared prototypes with brokers at several stages of iteration, incorporating feedback into subsequent rounds. Validated that the consolidated member search and unified view meaningfully reduced the number of steps needed to support a member — and surfaced a list of additional enhancements to prioritize post-launch.
Information architecture audit mapping current TPA features across the admin and legacy platform.
The central design decision was to start every TPA workflow from the member, not the task. Previously, an admin would navigate to a specific function (ID card request, enrollment lookup, claims) and then find the member within that context. The new experience flips this: search for the member first, and every available action — across all TPA capabilities — is accessible from that single member record.
The consolidated member view mirrors what the member sees on their own platform, giving admins the context they need to provide support without requiring PHI-restricted workarounds. Admins can also view associated plan members (family/dependents) directly from the same record. Actions that previously required manual data entry are now pre-populated from the member record, reducing friction and error.
The redesign also introduced standardized design system components throughout the admin — establishing a foundation that makes future additions (like wellbeing features) consistent and maintainable rather than bolted on.
Unified member search combining previously separate enrolled and non-enrolled lookup flows.
Admin-facing member view mirroring the member platform with additional admin permissions and actions.
Clients responded positively to the shift — the ability to see all member information in one place was a consistent point of feedback. The consolidated experience replaced a workflow that previously required navigating between a deprecated legacy platform and multiple disconnected admin sections.
The broker validation sessions surfaced a documented list of post-launch enhancement requests, reflecting strong engagement with the new experience and a clear signal that the member-first model was the right direction to build on.
The design system foundation introduced during this project also established a scalable pattern for the admin — subsequent features, including wellbeing integrations, now have a consistent structural model to follow.
The most valuable lesson from this project was the importance of zooming out before diving in. The TPA brief started as a feature migration, but the right solution required stepping back and asking a bigger question: how should this admin work as a whole? Taking the time to answer that question first — rather than just finding homes for individual features — is what made the final experience coherent rather than additive.
It also reinforced the value of putting prototypes in front of real users early and often. Broker feedback at multiple stages of iteration meaningfully shaped the final direction and built trust with a user group that had real pain points with the previous experience.