Homeowner Service Portal

This case study explores how we created a customer portal that gives users visibility into their services and invoices across 20 brands in a seamless experience.

My Role: I led the end-to-end design of a
universal payment portal for Neighborly’s core brands, enabling users to sign in, track invoices, and complete payments.

The Problem

Managing separate accounts across 20 brands created a fragmented experience with limited visibility into services, invoices, and payments. This led to missed payments, higher user effort, reduced perceived security, and lower revenue opportunities.

User & Business Goals

Create a seamless payment experience through a single portal where users can manage all invoices eliminating multiple logins while improving clarity, trust, and timely payments.

Increase revenue by improving payment collection rates and driving more bookings through a unified, engaging experience.

We interviewed customers and franchise owners to uncover pain points in the payment process. We used these insights to create a user journey to visualize friction points and customer sentiments, providing a clearer picture of their past experiences with our payment process. Key findings included:

• Frustrating having to sign into different sites to pay
• Customers do not feel comfortable uploading their credit card on multiple pay sites
• Difficult to recall past services and invoices
• Business owners really want to increase service bookings

To redesign and replace the old payment portal with the new Home Service portal that could significantly improve the customer portal experience.

Once we had enough data, I experimented with different design variations to determine the most efficient way for users to make a payment and view their payment.

Stakeholder Feedback & Learnings:

After I presented these wireframes to my stakeholders I learned we could lower the amount of user clicks by combining the current and past invoices onto a single page. Reduce the amount of columns within the tables and prioritize the content that was most important to cut down the amount of horizontal scrolling to streamline the experience.

We tested our prototype on 9 homeowners

• Participants completed key tasks including making a payment, adding a credit card, and reviewing past invoices

Users completed core tasks easily

• Most found the experience intuitive, with clear navigation

• 100% of first-time users found it easy or very easy to making a payment

"The payment page layout is straightforward and easy to understand, with clear options for paying invoices and viewing payment history."

Following testing, we observed and identified several usability issues:

• Lack of visible security cues caused users to hesitate during payment process

• Some users felt the interface was too plain and utilitarian like an Excel sheet than a polished product

• Some users relied on scanning due to unclear information hierarchy

These insights directly informed design refinements and guided the next phase of design.

Once the foundation was established, the focus shifted toward increasing engagement and service discovery—transforming the experience into a platform that surfaces relevant services, recommendations, and ongoing customer needs.

To move faster and validate ideas quickly, I used Lovable to rapidly prototype concepts like this checkout flow, helping leadership react to tangible solutions earlier and enabling engineers to assess feasibility more efficiently.

This experience was designed with a mobile-first mindset—translating the same engagement model into a streamlined, intuitive mobile experience.

The updated customer portal brought 20 Neighborly brands into a single, secure platform, making it easy for users to manage services and payments in one place. We also:

• Improved visibility into invoices and payment history, eliminating the need to track past bills manually
• Reduced payment steps from 5 to 3
• Enabled new revenue opportunities for franchise owners across brands
• Received strong support from senior leadership