Projects / Insurance Company

Reviving an Aging Insurance Company

Introduction

The insurance fund partnered with us as they recognized they had improvements that need to be made in order to remain competitive, increase customer retention, and increase customer acquisition. However, they weren't sure where to start or what the big picture of their customer experience looked like.

Scope of work

Research

Feature Design

Design System

Onboarding

Portal Redesign

Timeline

06/2024 - 12/2024

02/2025 - 05/2025

Start Date: 07/2025

The Problem

We don't know what our problem is

New launches falling flat and customers leaving to competitors lead us to a 6 month research project.

Discovering pain points

They had an idea of some areas of their various processes where policyholders and agents feel frustration. However, they didn't feel confident, across their whole customer experience, where every frustration was felt, why it was occurring, or how to address it.

Remaining competitive

The insurance fund found that business was actively going to their competitors and needed an analysis and research backed recommendations that would help them remain competitive in their market

Modernizing platforms

They knew their digital platforms had design issues but needed to pinpoint what issues existed, why they are issues, and how to approach solving them.

The Challenge

Where to start

Several audiences

Agents, employers, policy holders, and medical providers all make up the company's core user groups (medical providers omitted from project). All of these groups have their own portals and their own user journeys.

Consistent problems

Payments are late and cancellations are happening often. There seem to be problems with the users ability to complete crucial tasks that maintain their policy. Agents are feeling overwhelmed and think policies need to be babysat when working with this insurance company.

Losing business

The company's key clients were trying to find ways to leave, some even trying to find ways to change laws so they could work with other insurance companies.

The Soultion

Extensive research plan

Interviews:

We met with 5 employers, 5 policy holders, and 5 agents to uncover what was really going on for users.

Contextual inquiry:

We got boots on the ground for contextual inquiry; We sat with reception and customer support teams to shadow calls.

Heuristic evaluation:

We did an extensive 60+ slide heuristic evaluation of their policy holder portal and key user flows for the website.

Competitive analysis:

We looked into their main competitors and figured out what was working and what was not working, including feature analysis.

Final synthesis report:

We gathered a massive collection of data points and presented them to the stakeholders in a digestible way.

Agent Locator Feature & Design System

Live Designs

Included in this active phase of the project is a base design system to assist the insurance company in maintaining consistency across platforms.

Web Hi-fi Design:

Mobile Hi-Fi Design:

Portal Redesign & Agent Onboarding P.O.C. with figma sites

Upcoming designs

Using Figma Sites, a new feature that allows for responsive design and prototypes, I was able to create a realistic POC for the stakeholder to critique in half the time.

Flow:

Home:

Background

Into the weeds

The Process

Pre Discovery

The purpose of the pre-discovery period was to understand business processes, identify core user groups, discover understood potential pain points, and determine where to dive deeper.

Contractors seemed to feel bothered dealing with designers, who often don't consider the technicalities that go into building a home. Designers are bothered when contractors stray from the designs they curated with the client. Homeowners, who typically come from Pinterest, are aiming to create complex doors that cause headaches for contractors, designers, and HSCD.

The graph shows some information we were able to gather in this period to understand the basic composition of their business portfolio. I did remove some identifying information as this project is under NDA.

Collaboration

The insurance fund's involvement and investment into this project had a lot of pros and cons. Their involvement meant things moved quite quickly and understanding of our findings was transferred with a certain level of ease with the core members. Although, this involvement sometimes caused friction with our processes, it also helped us overcome some hurdles.

Supporting success

This was quite a large research project and the insurance fund didn't have a marketing department so reaching out to their different customer segments were a difficult undertaking for them. However, it was essential that all communication to their customer base came from them to establish trust before the interview. We provided some of the supporting materials (emails & postcards) to assist in scheduling user interviews.

Roadbumps & pivots

Throughout the research process and various reporting milestones we discovered that the team at the insurance fund needed deliverables to change and other formats of reporting that made more sense for their team. This caused our initial agreement to evolve over the course of the project and the need for our team to be very agile and willing to pivot quickly.

User Interviews

We conducted 15 interviews across all understood customer segments of the insurance fund.

We learned so much throughout this process including how they are seen in relation to their competitors, preferences of how to get various tasks done among different customers, and the overall strengths and weaknesses within their customer journey.

The most interesting thing was how wrong we were about the way we understood their customer base. The segments we had originally designed based on criteria mentioned above didn't matter whatsoever. In fact, there were completely different segments that made much more sense based on behavioral data we had collected.

Contextual inquiry

My teammate and I sat with various members of the internal team that had regular contact with policyholders to further understand what this process looks like from top to tail.

We met with their customer service team and their front desk for an hour and a half each and listened in on all the calls they took and asked questions about their process in handling specific issues.

Most people that volunteer for user interviews are generally satisfied with the service they are getting. We still understood a lot of pain points and several things that could be improved but it really benefitted our understanding and overall recommendations when we were able to listen to roughly 50 calls each with policyholders that were actively experiencing problems and the trends that exist there.

Heuristic anaysis

Analysis so good, it became company standard to use this heuristic analysis template for all projects

I conducted a heuristic evaluation in this project with some feedback and direction from my teammate. The work created a huge impact for the partner, and we ended up adopting it as our standard heuristic evaluation template within our UX team.

We also created a site map of their full digital experience including their policyholder/agent portal and website. From this sitemap, informed by the partner and user interview data, we determined key user flows to analyze based on industry best practices.

Competitive analysis

The Insurance Company was standing out from it's competitors in the wrong way

The insurance fund had a list of their top 3 competitors based on market share and wanted to understand how they were competing in the market alongside these companies. My teammate and I conducted a competitive analysis on each of these 3 competitors as well as 1 indirect competitor. This analysis included things like digital feature offering comparisons, marketing mix comparisons, SWOT analysis, and target market comparisons.

Final report

The current site's main issues were poor accessibility, inconsistent navigation, out-dated content and styling.

We were able to collect, analyze, and synthesize all of our data from each research activity and compile them into key insights which we then grouped together into four core themes.

This was then plotted onto an impact-effort matrix to give further context and make prioritization of each issue simpler for the insurance fund team.