Although a high computational accuracy can be obtained when a membrane element with rotational degrees of freedom is used for the numerical analysis of wall-beam connection of high-rise building, this method often leads to some weak analysis results because of the vague relation between rotational degrees of freedom and displacement field compared with beam or slab element. In this paper, a constraint relation was established between the rotational displacement field with independent interpolation and the rotational angle of rigid body through adopting a penalty function method, and then an improved membrane element with rotational degrees of freedom was constructed based on the work of ALLMAN. The improved membrane element was added in the standard analysis module of ANSYS through using a second development interface named UPFs (User Programming Features). Also, a curved wall was adopted as the example to test the performance of improved membrane element. The preliminary results show the improved membrane element can pass most of patch tests with no extra zero energy mode. To further verify the performance of improved membrane element used for the analysis of wall-beam connection, a high-rise building with coupled shear walls was also adopted to compare the numerical analysis results produced by four different simulation elements. The results show the improved membrane element is a reliable and superior type with some advantages including simple data preparation, convenient programming and insensitive penalty parameter.