Sunlife
Client
Sunlife
Industry
UI Design
Location
Hong Kong
Year
2025
Sunlife Advisor Workbench is a secure, all-in-one internal web portal designed for agents, brokers, and Banca partners. It streamlines daily workflows by providing a centralized platform to manage the entire policy lifecycle, process and track claims, and execute marketing campaigns
Objectives
Apply the new brand guidelines by developing a scalable UI Kit, ensuring the refreshed visual identity enhances clarity, reinforces hierarchy, and maintains accessibility across all components.
The redesign will architect the workbench as a platform for future growth. We are designing a flexible and extensible layout system with clear zones for integrating new modules, establishing the foundational patterns needed to seamlessly absorb other tools and evolve into a consolidated super-app.
Refine IA involves optimizing the navigation, streamlining complex workflows, and exploring alternative UX solutions to create a more intuitive and efficient user experience
Challenge
A primary challenge was adapting the global brand guidelines, which did not account for all the complex scenarios in our application or the unique typographic and layout requirements of the Chinese language. This forced us to rapidly design and approve a suite of new, custom components.
Manage conflicting feedback post-design review
Following design reviews, we were inundated with valuable but often conflicting feedback, including numerous requests that were technically unfeasible or clearly out of scope. This created a critical prioritization challenge, requiring us to act as product strategists to diplomatically push back, clarify constraints, and triage requests into a "now vs. later" framework.
Legacy system constraints
The most disruptive challenge was the constant uncertainty caused by the old backend system. We frequently discovered that data points were unavailable or workflows were too rigid to support our proposed designs, even after they had been formally signed off by stakeholders. This demanded a highly agile and resilient design process, where we had to quickly ideate and present alternative solutions post-sign-off, balancing user needs against hard technical limitations without compromising the core experience.
Approach
We will begin with a thorough audit, cataloging every existing screen, state, and user flow within the current application. This process creates a complete visual and functional inventory, serving as our single source of truth to understand the current ecosystem and identify all points of interaction that require redesign.
With with BAs and the local design team to synthesize business requirements and user needs. This collaboration is crucial to validate our findings from the audit, clarify complex rules, and define new features that add genuine value for the clients.
Solutions
Our priority is to maximize the reuse of existing global components, only creating new ones when absolutely necessary. Each new element undergoes rigorous cross-checking with the local design team to ensure perfect alignment with brand standards. This disciplined approach maintains visual consistency while accelerating our design process and reducing redundant work.
We focus on delivering the fundamental requirements that address stakeholders' immediate needs, while strategically designing for more comprehensive future enhancements. This balanced approach ensures we solve the core problem effectively in the current phase.
We maintain close partnership with development through regular checkpoints and technical reviews. This ensures every feature is feasible and properly implemented, allowing us to make necessary adjustments while keeping the overall project progress on track
