Client name withheld under NDA.
For B2B software, the customer portal is the product. SME owners and HR admins in Singapore log in every month to run payroll, submit CPF contributions and manage leave, often in a hurry and without training. When a portal is confusing, customers do not complain about design; they open support tickets, take longer to finish routine tasks and eventually look at competitors.
This payroll software company had grown to around 2,100 active admin users, but its portal had been built feature by feature over six years. Running monthly payroll took an average of 34 minutes, only 58% of admins in testing could finish it without help, and the support team handled about 640 how-to tickets a month. Customer satisfaction with the portal sat at 3.4 out of 5.
We analysed six months of support tickets, interviewed 18 customers, watched 12 admins run payroll in recorded sessions and mapped where they hesitated, backtracked or gave up.
Tickets and recordings showed the real problems, which were often different from what the internal team assumed. Payroll was failing at three specific steps. The research also gave the product team a shared view of the problems, which made later design decisions faster to agree.
We reorganised the navigation around the tasks admins do most, rebuilt the payroll run as a guided four-step flow and redesigned the CPF and leave screens around what admins check first.
Admins think in tasks, not features. Grouping screens by task meant they no longer had to remember where each setting lived. Fewer steps also meant fewer places to make mistakes, which reduced the number of payroll corrections admins had to make each month.
We designed the new screens and a reusable design system of components, colours and typography, with clear error messages and inline help for every field that caused tickets.
A design system kept the portal consistent as new features were added, and inline help answered questions at the moment they came up. Clear error messages also told admins exactly what to fix, instead of a generic warning that sent them straight to support.
We tested clickable prototypes with 20 admins over two rounds, measured task completion and time, and refined the flows before any development started.
Fixing problems in a prototype costs a fraction of fixing them in code. Two rounds of testing raised completion from 58% to 91% before launch. Testing with real admins also surfaced small wording changes that made a big difference, such as renaming a confusing button.
We delivered developer-ready specifications, supported the build, rolled the new portal out in stages and tracked tickets, task times and satisfaction for three months.
A staged rollout let the team fix small issues with a few customers first, and tracking showed the redesign was working in real use, not just in testing. Tracking also gave the support team early warning of any new questions, which they turned into short in-app tips.
Three months after launch, how-to support tickets had fallen from 640 to 360 a month. The average payroll run took 14 minutes instead of 34, and 91% of admins in testing completed it without help. Portal satisfaction rose from 3.4 to 4.5 out of 5, active admin users grew to 2,480, and cancellation requests citing ease of use fell from 23 to 8 a quarter. The support team used the time saved to onboard new customers faster.
Research, new flows, design system and two rounds of prototype testing, then a staged launch.
All customers moved to the new portal and how-to tickets fell below 450 a month.
360 how-to tickets a month and payroll runs averaging 14 minutes.
Six months of how-to tickets showed exactly where the portal confused people. Designing around them targeted the problems that mattered most.
Two rounds of prototype testing raised task completion from 58% to 91% before a line of code was written, which is far cheaper than fixing a launched product.
Admins log in to run payroll, not to find a settings page. Rebuilding the portal around their main tasks made routine work faster and calmer.
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