Overview

The Fortune 200 financial services company I was employed by wanted to develop a solution to bridge the gap between their siloed insurance product offerings; this would simplify member’s acquisition of multiple products to ensure adequate protection of their property. An internal design competition was held to inspire innovation and quickly iterate through many possible solutions.  

Problem Statement

New insurance products had been developed at different times over the years as the company grew, thus complicating the experience of buying auto insurance versus homeowners or renters insurance, etc. This caused many who needed multiple types of insurance to lose momentum or abandon obtaining additional products altogether.

Users & Audience

The solution was intended to help members of this financial institution who are in some way affiliated with the military, either currently serving, retired, or the family members of a service-member, who need to insure their car, home, or other personal property.

We used pre-existing personas that had been created by our independent usability/user research team. Three personas were selected to focus our designed solution.

Roles & Responsibilities

The team consisted of: myself- acting as team lead and lead designer, two other designers, a producer, and a front-end developer. We were co-located and met in-person to tackle the problem. Together, we collaborated on understanding the problem and white-board possible solutions.

The project had to be completed in a month, outside of the regular project work we were each responsible for. I recruited the team members, kept us organized, and focused our objectives during our collaborative sessions.

Scope & Constraints

We had access to basic company resources, however, the project was unfunded. Otherwise, we had four weeks of personal time to produce a viable prototype of our solution.

We had to acquire information regarding the system architecture to understand the limitations and opportunities of the back-end design, as well as, identify the challenges that our solution would need to account for and seek to overcome.

This project required the application of commonly used design patterns from the e-commerce retail space to bundle multiple insurance products into one seamless checkout experience.

Process

My team met to sketch ideas for solving the issue of multiple, disparate quote flows, and how we could design the questions and flow to satisfy several product needs at once. Our goal was to have just one quote flow that could dynamically serve quotes for any combination of insurance products, as well as use algorithms to make statistically relevant product recommendations.

We engaged with product management and other business development teams to evaluate and refine the questions asked during the quote process flow in order to reduce the cognitive load and time required to complete an insurance quote, as both affected the likelihood of completing a purchase. We also worked to reduce redundancy in questioning to maximize efficiency in the flow.

Considering the need for restructuring the backend system architecture, we worked through the system redesign and created a new model structure to support our solution.

Using the mobile first approach we sketched mobile screen designs of the flow and created a working paper prototype we could test amongst ourselves, friends, and family. As we refined our solution and paper prototype, we created higher-fidelity designs and then a functioning prototype for demo.

Outcomes & Lessons

We presented our solution to executive leadership and earned 4th place in the competition. Parts of our solution were borrowed, and later combined, to become the requirements for a later project implementing product bundling across all channels and was launched for public use.

From this project, I learned how to select and assemble a team, lead the collaboration, and execute a design solution from concept to prototype. As we combed through existing processes, I learned how to question the reasoning behind previous business and design decisions as well as identify opportunities for improvement to satisfy both business and user needs.

I no longer work for said company, however, my team’s solution did contribute significantly to the way this company now conducts business; namely, in serving a solution to allow multiple product acquisition options for its members.