Getting evidence to the right place without the wrong friction

CEL Solicitors is a UK consumer law firm that handles fraud and scam recovery cases on a no-win, no-fee basis. Once a client signs up, they need to submit evidence through a web portal: bank statements, chat transcripts, scam correspondence, photo ID. A case can’t move forward until this evidence is in, so a confusing upload step doesn’t just frustrate someone, it holds up their claim.

The existing portal was a single-page form. Enter your case reference and postcode, drag files into an upload area, pick a category from a dropdown, hit submit. It technically worked, but clients kept struggling to upload evidence correctly, and case handlers were the ones hearing about it. That feedback loop, clients reporting friction to the case handlers who then flagged it to me, is where the problem definition came from. The portal assumed people knew how to create a zip file, could categorise their own documents through a generic dropdown, and would understand jargon like “CEL Number”. None of that was reasonable for the audience.

Case handlers told me chasing evidence was the most common reason they contacted clients. To size it, I pulled two months of contact logs for new cases. More than half needed at least one follow-up about evidence, many of them more than once. That added up to roughly a working week of handler time every month spent asking clients to re-send things.

The reasons broke down clearly, most common first:

Most chases traced back to things the interface could prevent: unclear categories, a submit button that accepted nothing, and no file constraints. Missing documents were a different problem. Clients often didn’t know what to send, and the portal only partly solves that.

I reviewed the existing portal against Nielsen’s heuristics and cross-referenced the findings against the client complaints case handlers had been relaying. The portal hadn’t been formally reviewed since it was built, so problems had quietly accumulated without anyone seeing the full scope.

Grounding the audit in the actual user, someone dealing with a fraud case, likely anxious, often on mobile, made the failures harder to dismiss. Seven issues mapped directly to usability failures, spanning error handling, categorisation, and trust.

The authentication problems surface immediately. The error banner fires before the user has done anything, overlapping the page heading and undermining confidence before a single field has been touched. The “CEL Number” label offers no format hint or example, so people either guess or call support. All three validation errors appear at once on an empty form, which is disorienting and reads as the portal blaming the user for something they haven’t done yet.

The upload experience has its own problems. The upload area shows no file type or size constraints, so people only discover the limits after a failed attempt. The evidence type dropdown expects clients to map their own documents onto CEL’s internal categories with no guidance. “Add More Evidence” is ambiguous: it isn’t clear whether it adds another file to the same category or starts a new one. And the submit button stays active with nothing attached, leaving the door open to empty submissions.

Before the individual design decisions, here’s the flow I designed, from first landing through to confirmation.

The redesign started from the problems, not the interface. Each decision answered something specific that was failing: a support call generated, a file sent to the wrong category, a client left wondering whether their evidence had even arrived. The goal was a portal a fraud victim could use without having to think too hard, on whatever device they happened to have in their hand.

There was a second thing shaping every decision. This user arrives already primed to distrust, they’ve just been scammed, and now a website is asking them to hand over bank statements and ID. For them, confusion and suspicion are the same feeling: every ambiguity reads as a possible trap. So reducing confusion was never only about clicks, it was about lowering the sense of risk at each step.

The design is mobile-first throughout, and that came from the data, not an assumption. GA4 showed most clients reach the site and upload their evidence on a phone. That fits the context: when a request for evidence arrives, they’re usually at home, often stressed, using whatever’s to hand. Every layout decision, every touch target, every piece of instruction copy was written and tested at mobile viewport widths first, then adapted up.

The new flow starts with a dedicated sign-in screen: CEL reference number and postcode, with placeholder examples showing the expected format (e.g. FRA123456, M1 1AA). The format examples matter more than they look: they remove the fear of getting it wrong on the very first step, before any trust has been built. The sign-in card is centred and contained, with the CEL logo above it. Trust badges for encrypted transfer, GDPR, SRA regulation and no third-party sharing run along the footer, in view while someone decides whether to hand over their details.

The portal now asks “What are you uploading?” in a modal with clearly labelled options, each with a plain-language subtitle. An “Other document” option means no one gets stuck. The picker does the categorisation work for the user instead of expecting them to understand CEL’s internal taxonomy.

Each evidence type becomes its own card with its own upload zone. File constraints are shown directly in each upload area. “Add more evidence” and “Upload Evidence” are visually separated: the first sits inside the card container, the second outside and muted until at least one file is attached, which prevents empty submissions.

The landing screen sets expectations before anyone uploads. A short “How to upload” block explains the three steps in plain language, so first-time users aren’t guessing at the pattern. The “Add new evidence” button opens the type picker, and the main “Upload Evidence” button stays disabled until at least one file is attached, so the primary action never pretends to be ready before it is. For an anxious user, that removes a specific fear: the “did I just submit nothing?” moment that sends people straight to the phone.

This screen carries more trust weight than any other in the flow. A defrauded person needs proof it worked before they’ll believe it did, so the new thank-you page shows the case reference number, a submission timestamp, a summary of what was uploaded by category, and a “What happens next” section with three concrete steps. An explicit “You can safely close this window” line gives people permission to leave without second-guessing whether it worked.