This project focuses on designing a fresh digital brand identity for the company and creating a responsive e-commerce site that allows customers customize how they bundle coverage.
How do we create a platform for friendly direct to consumer insurance package sales?
We want to know what information influences the decision to purchase with one company over another so that we can optimize the online insurance experience.
• Review Competitor sites to identify and compare features and experience.
• Understand what information someone would need to ask during the process of applying for insurance.
• How do user needs and interests change between different types of insurance?
• Understand how the user navigates through the journey of purchasing an insurance policy.
In order to get a better understanding of the insurance market space I created a chart comparing the greatest number of different insurance companies to compare and contrast their coverage, features and selling points.
Some key elements like member account access, and ability to file a claim were mostly universal, while others like including Search functionality and User Reviews were not always included.
From my secondary research, I was able to get a good picture of which users would need to access which features, and had 2 distinct groups of users. For this exercise, I would focus only on insurance shoppers.
• The interview questions were developed and framed to understand the experience each interviewee has through the whole process of buying insurance, including what goes into their decision making process when purchasing.
• Information I was particularly eager to ascertain was how much research and help insurance buyers went through before deciding to purchase.
• Due to project constraints and the state of the Pandemic at the time, interviews were conducted remotely via video call.
• 5 participants were interviewed, ranging in age, but focused on the 20-30 yo demographic who are most likely to be purchasing rather than renewing a policy.
Users want to be able to access all the information available to them.
Following my interviews I identified two groups with very different experiences purchasing insurance for those with experience than those who were potentially purchasing insurance for the first time.
To represent this I created 2 different personas to represent the novice and the veteran insurance buyer.
Nick represents my veteran buyer. He knows what he wants out of the experience before he starts the buying process.
Rae represents my younger buyer, she's likely thinking more about staying on budget than getting the most complete coverage.
There are many stakeholder's the designer at Kaus would need to balance the interests of.
Making sure as were tackling user needs we don't lose sight of business goals, and don't create a product that's unfeasible to develop and support.
While it’s impossible to satisfy every stakeholder need, balancing these considerations will be crucial to building this product.
I performed open card sorts with the goal of determining how individuals group different forms of insurance as well as how returning customers categorize different types of tasks.
Based on the results of this similarity matrix some clusters are beginning to form, especially among forms of health and property insurance.
Some branches of the tree jack had solid agreement, while some items like identity protection and liability insurance had very little agreement from participants. More participants would be necessary to find more definitive data.
The first task flow incorporates the process the user took to get from the homepage to choosing an insurance package.
The second task flow picks up after the user has chosen a package and goes through the purchasing experience.
• Once I had my card sorting results, I had enough data to start constructing a site map around.
• The two main sections of the sitemap cater to the 2 distinct types of users I identified: New customers and existing customers, and detailed the basic framework of the site.
• The prototype only encompasses the experience of a new customer going from the homescreen through purchasing a policy.
I created 3 distinct homepage designs utilizing different ways of organizing content.
The first used a selection matrix, meant to maximize the number of policies a user would choose to bundle together.
The second and third would use a smart search query that would match searches with tagged CMS items.
Through testing and critique UI elements were made more consistent and details began to take shape.
With no logo or branding history to build off of, I had to create my own Designing Branding for a company without a history of previous designs is difficult. I started by thinking about how this company may want to market itself.
I came up with the tag line 'shining a light on great savings'. This became the perfect visual to base my logo on. I created a graphic of of a lamp and then removed detail until the logo was a better minimal abstraction of the concept.
Desktop and Mobile versions of a prototype that took the users from landing on the homescreen all the way through purchasing an auto and renters policy bundle.
All participants who tested the prototype were able to successfully navigate the flow without direct instruction, but testing highlighted where my users were getting confused.
From my testing, some clear patterns of shared Successes and Pain Points allowed me to make additional adjustments for the final design.
Successes:
• Easy to Understand
• Progress Bar was great
• Good mobile experience
Pain Points:
• Expected a Zipcode first
• Too many options
• Confusion on Property pages
This was the first time I'd gone through the full user experience design process for a software product, here's a couple things I learned:
Don't be afraid to copy a pattern.
I have a habit of being ambitious, wanting to create something that no one's ever seen before. But often this is the anti-thesis of human behavior that seeks to find familiarity when presented with something new.
I learned that I shouldn't fear reusing existing patterns, but embrace them.
Mobile considered more from the start.
From my interviews I learned most insurance buyers do their shopping from a laptop/desktop.
I thought that because my research had shown insurance buyers were still purchasing from computers, I could focus on designing for the larger breakpoints, and adapt the design to mobile later. This became a huge bottleneck to the design process, as my components didn't initially translate well on mobile.
Next time, regardless of the research I'll definitely bring the mobile adaptation from the start.
