Broken on mobile
Field workers relied on tablets and phones, but layouts fractured on smaller screens when seconds mattered most.
Case study
Bank Hapoalim — Employee Portal & Mobile App
Designing the digital workplace for Israel's largest bank.
Enterprise UX
Internal Tools
Mobile
Responsive
Fintech
12,000
Employees served
3M
Bank customers
752
Research participants
13
Stakeholder interviews
Context
Internal tools at national scale
My role
Freelance UX/UI Designer — Research, Design, Testing
Company
Bank Hapoalim
Team size
Independent lead (partnered with stakeholders & engineering)
Segment
Enterprise internal platforms — banking operations
Timeline
2019–2021
Users
Branch staff, managers, call centre teams, field employees
Platforms
Web (responsive) + iOS/Android
Tools
Figma, usability testing, affinity mapping
Problem
“12,000 employees. One portal. Zero consistency.”
These weren’t consumer products — they were operational tools used daily to serve customers. Bad UX didn’t just frustrate employees; it slowed customer-facing service and drained operational efficiency.
Scattered daily tasks
Attendance, calendars, meetings, and system links lived in disconnected tools — employees felt constant time pressure.
No single source of truth
People bounced between systems to answer basic questions — fragmentation was the default state.
My role & leadership
Solo ownership across research and dual products
What I owned
Ran discovery interviews, presented to department heads, and translated 752 survey responses into a prioritised direction — without a product manager to filter noise.
How I structured the work
Coordinated web portal and “Portal to Go” mobile app as one language system: shared patterns, divergent only where context demanded it.
Process
Research-led, adoption-aware delivery
01
Research
Thirteen stakeholder interviews plus a 752-person survey and competitive audit — distilled into three pillars that steered every major decision.
02
Architecture
Unified search as the homepage anchor returning people, pages, and systems in one query for branch staff mid- conversation.
03
Portal design
Role-specific personal areas and a scannable homepage for news, tools, and daily operational workflows.
04
Mobile app
Attendance module with bold time, remote mode, fingerprint auth, and offline-aware checks before submission.
05
Usability testing
Ten onboarding tests with affinity mapping; progressive disclosure trimmed drop-off as familiarity grew.
Key design decisions
Speed, compliance, and adoption
Search as primary homepage action
Chosen: Unified search returning people, pages, and systems under one query.
Branch employees needed answers mid-customer conversation — every extra click was customer wait time.
Attendance flow for field workers
Chosen: Toggle-first UI, fingerprint auth, remote work mode, offline fallback before sync.
Regulatory attendance from phones with shaky connectivity — failure wasn’t annoyance, it was compliance risk.
Progressive onboarding vs. full reveal
Chosen: Progressive disclosure validated across 10 usability sessions.
Full complexity on first launch caused drop-off; each removed friction point bought long-term adoption.
Visuals
Portal + mobile moments in the field
Outcomes
Signal at scale, clarity in production
752
Research participants
Largest survey program to date.
12,000
Employees served
Across all branches.
3M
Bank customers
Downstream impact of faster internal tools.
10
Usability tests
Onboarding sequence alone.
Delivered a responsive employee portal with unified search and role-aware personal areas, plus a mobile attendance experience engineered for compliance in the field. One visual and interaction language now stretches across both surfaces — reducing training load while improving everyday speed.
Reflection
Internal platforms deserve consumer-grade rigor
“Internal tools are underinvested in.” Employees feel the pain first, but customers pay the price in slower service. Treating internal UX seriously is a performance investment, not a polish pass.
“The bigger the organisation, the more important the research.” With 12,000 people, bad assumptions echo further. Seven hundred fifty-two respondents gave us signal most teams never get.
“Managing stakeholders independently sharpens judgment.” Without a PM buffer, translating raw data into a prioritised story forces clarity — there’s nowhere to hide.