What It Actually Takes to Build a Client Portal People Use
The high-bar standard I hear from clients at the start of most portal projects is some version of the same thing: it must be immediately usable. If it takes a few training sessions to figure things out, it’s not intuitive.
At Soliant Consulting, my team and I approach UX as practices embedded throughout the build, from prototyping to error handling. We focus on getting four things right:
1. Defining an Intuitive User Experience
User experience is subjective and a real constraint that shapes how we work. One person looks at a user interface and says it’s the best they’ve ever seen. Another person gets on the same platform and can’t figure out how to navigate it. Both are right about their own experience. We aren’t focused on winning awards but on building an interface that users can immediately use. We figure that out by prototyping with real users and iterating based on what we learn.
2. Prototype First, Build Second
Before our team starts writing production code on any application, we build a working prototype. There’s a real difference between a functional interface mock and a slide deck with screenshots.
We use AI-assisted tools to build out a working interface very rapidly. Clients can get their hands on it right away. They can see their vision for the application in something beyond a requirements document. We give them something they can actually interact with.
Once the internal team has had a chance to work through the prototype and surface their feedback, we take it a step further. We identify the actual end users of the application, put together a small target user group, and get the prototype in front of them before development starts.
The practical reason to do this is simple. A navigation problem caught at the prototype stage takes hours to fix. The same problem caught at week six of development takes significantly longer. Getting early user feedback is one of the most cost-effective investments on a portal project.
3. Mobile-Friendly Is a Default
Every application that we build is mobile-responsive by default. Whether a user is coming in on a full desktop browser, a tablet, or a phone, the experience needs to hold up. Clients don’t have to request this feature. It’s how we build.
You don’t get to control how your clients access the portal. A tax client checking on a document upload from their phone has the same expectation of a clean experience as someone sitting at a desktop in an office. Building for one and bolting on the other tends to produce an experience that works well for neither.
We use Material UI across our applications. It gives us a consistent, structurally sound component library that reliably handles responsive behavior across device sizes.
Mobile-first is table stakes, but the real UX difference comes down to how the application behaves when things break.
4. Error Handling Is a UX Problem
This is the piece most portal builds underinvest in, and it tends to show up at the worst possible time.
Any client portal that integrates with external SaaS platforms is going to encounter back-end connection issues. Billing systems go down. Document platforms return errors. APIs time out. We know these are risks and plan for what the user sees when they do.
If the application fails in a confusing or alarming way, the user loses confidence in the portal. They go back to calling their account manager. The adoption problem you were trying to solve with the portal gets worse, not better.
My team and I work through these scenarios during our foundation phase as part of what we call non-functional requirements. How gracefully does the application fail? How do error notifications appear clearly and helpfully? Which failure modes require fully coded graceful degradation, and which can be handled with a simple message?
Those are the right questions, and they need answers before the build starts. Handling these things well takes time, and time maps to budget. Clients who skip this encounter problems mid-project at higher cost.
Your Enterprise UX Design Partner
Building a portal that earns regular use takes more than a clean design. It takes prototyping with real users before development starts, building responsively by default, and thinking through how the application behaves when things go wrong. Contact our cloud-native application team to talk through what the UX process would look like for your portal project.
