System Mapping & User Flows
To align engineering and product stakeholders, I mapped comprehensive user flows for both the Member-Driven and Dependent-Driven authorization models, highlighting critical logic gates and database dependencies.
Dependent Account Creation
Procedure for Dependents to Create an Online Account
Client
MetLife Legal Plans also known as MLP is a group legal insurance plan only offered through an individual's employer.
Tools
Sketch
InVision
Miro
Power Point
Zenhub
My Role
Product Designer - Led end-to-end UX strategy, complex flow architecture, and interaction design. Partnered cross-functionally with engineering, product management, and legal counsel to navigate stringent enterprise compliance requirements.
Project Time
3 Months
Background
MetLife Legal Plans (MLP) provides comprehensive group legal insurance exclusively through employer-sponsored benefits. A critical feature of these premium plans is the ability for primary members to extend coverage to their eligible dependents.
The Challenge
Historically, the digital platform (legalplans.com) lacked infrastructure to support dependent accounts. Dependents were forced into a high-friction offline flow, requiring them to call a service center to access benefits.
Data Blindspots: The absence of dependent telemetry severely limited product analytics and obscured actual utilization metrics.
Technical Debt: Modernizing the broader tech stack was bottlenecked by this legacy phone-based authorization model.
Poor User Experience: Dependents experienced significant friction accessing digital products and self-serve tools they were legally entitled to use.
Requirements Gathering
Due to the highly regulated nature of legal insurance, I spearheaded discovery sessions across legal, compliance, sales, and customer service to define strict security constraints and ensure the digital experience mitigated risk without sacrificing usability.
Strategic Parameters
What are the strict privacy boundaries between a primary member and a dependent's case data?
How must the UI dynamically adapt based on dependent classification (spouse vs. child)?
What are the current operational bottlenecks in the call center's manual verification process?
What are the legal thresholds for self-identification versus primary member authorization?
How can this new digital capability be leveraged as a competitive differentiator by the B2B sales team?
Synthesized Constraints
Regulatory & Privacy:
To comply with attorney-client privilege, the primary member cannot have any visibility into the legal transactions of the dependent. However, the primary member retains ultimate administrative control over access provisioning.
Legacy System Architecture:
Currently, verification relies on high-risk verbal confirmation. Dependents provide the primary member's PII to agents to secure case numbers.
Unlike standard health insurance, MetLife Legal does not systematically capture dependent rosters during open enrollment. The new system must handle dynamic, post-enrollment verification.
Complex Edge Cases:
The architecture must support up to seven distinct dependent tiers, each dictating unique feature flags and access constraints within the portal.
Competitive Landscape
I conducted a heuristic evaluation of eight prominent competitors across the insurtech and broader fintech sectors. By mapping their dependent onboarding flows, I identified three primary architectural models for account provisioning, establishing a baseline to measure our proposed solutions against industry standards.
Strategic Objectives
To engineer a secure, scalable dependent onboarding ecosystem, the solution must accomplish the following:
Establish a frictionless architecture for multi-user account creation.
Implement a robust, asynchronous verification model to confirm dependent eligibility.
Design a flexible permission matrix to handle varying privacy rights based on dependent tiers.
Ensure seamless database linkage between primary and dependent accounts to unlock holistic utilization analytics.
Empower primary members with centralized, intuitive administrative controls over dependent access.
Architectural Approaches
I mapped out four distinct user flows categorized under two overarching paradigms.
Dependent-Driven: Dependent self-registers and triggers an authorization request.
Member-Driven: Primary member proactively provisions access via a secure invitation protocol.
Structural Wireframing
Translating logic into interface, I developed wireframes to stress-test the four potential onboarding architectures against our strict security and usability constraints.
The Solution: Member-Driven Provisioning
Following rigorous review with legal and security stakeholders, I recommended the Member-Driven invitation model. Shifting the burden of authorization to the primary member intrinsically verified eligibility before account creation began. This completely eliminated the security vulnerabilities associated with the legacy self-identification model, ensuring absolute compliance with enterprise risk protocols.
High-Fidelity Prototyping
Transitioning to high-fidelity, I designed the final UI utilizing MetLife's design system. These mockups served as the primary artifacts for cross-functional alignment, undergoing numerous iterations to refine error states, edge cases, and accessibility compliance before engineering handoff.
Final Architecture: Member Invitation Flow
The final implementation features a secure dashboard where primary members can seamlessly provision and manage dependent access. This flow was rigorously engineered to prevent erroneous email dispatching and ensure airtight linkage between the primary and child accounts in the database.
Final Architecture: Dependent Activation Flow
Upon receiving a secure, tokenized invitation, the dependent is guided through a frictionless activation process. The backend logic dynamically configures their dashboard permissions based on the specific dependent tier assigned by the primary member, ensuring perfect compliance without sacrificing UX.
Final UI Design & Interaction for Member Invite Process
In this video you can see the design come to life in production on the Legalplans website. This is a production view of a member sending an invite to a dependent account.
Final UI Design & Interaction for Dependent Account Creation Process
In this video you can see the design come to life in production on the Legalplans website. This is a production view of a dependent creating a account after getting a dependent account creation invite.
Strategic Retrospective
Navigating Enterprise Complexity: This project reinforced the critical importance of defensive design in highly regulated industries. Accounting for complex data hierarchies (members, varying dependent tiers, diverse plan codes) required meticulous systems thinking to ensure the UI remained deceptively simple for the end-user.
Aligning UX with Security: By pivoting from a dependent-driven to a member-driven model, I learned how to leverage UX strategy to solve fundamental security vulnerabilities. Designing for the true source of truth (the paying member) not only streamlined the flow but permanently retired a high-risk legacy process.