Innovation by design: crafting a superior experience for specialty insurance
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Summary
- The primary goal of UX design is to create solutions that address the pain points of the client and provide meaningful and relevant experiences.
- Through conducting extensive research and workshops with customers, we built a solution that addressed three of the most common challenges facing insurers today.
- However, while customer problems are our focus as UX designers, we also had to look inward to address our history of adding features incrementally as we improved the platform.
- To make our customer’s experience on the platform enjoyable and simple to navigate, we used the Double Diamond approach, a design process model for problem-solving, design and innovation.
- Transforming the insurance industry's traditional practices through technology is not merely about introducing new tools—it's about ensuring these tools are user-friendly, efficient, and genuinely address the challenges that insurers face.
- By placing an emphasis on our user experience, we've been able to simplify complex tasks, meet diverse user needs, and ultimately deliver a product that not only meets but exceeds our customers' expectations.
Insurance technology companies come in many shapes and sizes. However, one common element between them all is the desire to transform the insurance industry’s archaic practices and pull them into the 21st century. Whether it be removing friction from underwriters’ day-to-day operations or helping insurers service better insights from their data, one key element that sells this aspiration and turns it into reality is a well-designed UX or user experience. For instance, a study by Accenture found that 73% of customers are more likely to switch to an insurer that offers a superior digital experience.
Read on to discover the key ingredients of good UX design, how we implemented it within Insurwave, and how it has improved our product and delighted our customers.
What is UX Design?
The primary goal of UX design is to create solutions that address the pain points of the client and provide meaningful and relevant experiences.
So, what exactly does this involve? You may think UX design is concerned with the UI’s colours or the visual elements that users interact with, such as buttons, icons, and page layouts. However, a UX designer’s work will encompass the entire process of design, usability, and function. Beyond useability, a UX designer must also consider efficiency and providing a delightful user experience.
While there is no one definitive answer for what makes for a good user experience, ultimately, the mark of good UX design is a user experience that meets the customer’s needs in the specific context in which they use the product. With that said, what role does UX play in helping our customers solve their biggest challenges?
Solving customer challenges with UX
Like many industries that deal with finance, the insurance industry has often been accused of lagging behind others when it comes to modernising the way it handles its internal processes.
Through conducting extensive research and workshops with customers, we built a solution that addressed three of the most common challenges facing insurers today:
1. From tradition to transformation
As an industry that had become too comfortable with spreadsheets, we needed to work with clients to understand their needs and then translate that into a digital experience that reflects how their working environment in a clear and intuitive way.
2. Representing the complexity of insurance
As the title suggests, specialty insurance needs often deal with highly complex products that come with a wealth of data. With underwriting teams often hard-pressed for time, we needed to design a solution that helped present the data needed in a clear, easily digestible format that allowed them to make better-informed decisions quickly.
3. Meeting the diverse user needs and abilities
To design a solution that made the most impact possible, we needed to account for several wide-ranging user needs and abilities, taking care to never assume a particular level of competence to ensure the platform was as intuitive as possible. As the platform matures, we continue to take feedback from our clients when releasing new features to ensure this same principle is applied.
Applying UX best practice
However, while customer problems are our focus as UX designers, we also had to look inward to address our history of adding features incrementally as we improved the platform. While this made sense in theory, customer feedback highlighted its detrimental impact on the overall user journey, resulting in a fragmented experience for our customers.
To make our customer’s experience on the platform enjoyable and simple to navigate, we used the Double Diamond approach, a design process model for problem-solving, design and innovation. The model is broken up into four key stages, Discovery, Define, Develop, Deliver.
The Double Diamond Design Process Model
1. Discovery
Using a combination of inputs shared with our client success teams and the qualitative insights from our screen recording sessions, we began to build a picture of how our users felt when interacting with the platform. The key message that came out of this feedback was one of frustration, as many users were getting lost in a navigation loop due to our information not being organised in a clear way.
Our user journeys needed to be revisited to consider the additions to the platform’s features in the platform over the years since we began. Our user flows needed to be simplified so that our users could understand the structure and motive of the platform at a glance. Effectively, the product should capture their behaviour and processes from the real world.
Ideation Session with teams across Product and Client Success
2. Define
Segment of the platform information architecture
With insights now at hand, we redesigned the user journeys to capture the customer’s emotions throughout the process of performing important tasks on the platform, like navigating through a policy and updating it or extracting insights.
We then mapped out user flows that could represent their thoughts and feelings. We created wireframes, which are schematics created in the early stages of product design, to help visualize and communicate the structure of a product and tested these with a set of users to iteratively improve our thinking and understanding of their pain points.
Clickable prototypes helped utilise the wireframes to test initial designs with users
3. Develop
User Testing with our clients yielded valuable feedback for the next design iteration
4. Deliver
With a busy roadmap of new features, we decided to roll out the redesigned screens incrementally in a way that would add the best value to our clients. Following their implementation, we have received feedback that users can now find the information they need and have a better experience.
However, as the double diamond process illustrates, this is not the end of the process. This feedback will be fed back into the beginning of our next discovery process as we continue to iterate and improve on the overall experience.
Innovation by design
Transforming the insurance industry's traditional practices through technology is not merely about introducing new tools—it's about ensuring these tools are user-friendly, efficient, and genuinely address the challenges that insurers face. With companies implementing top design practices growing twice as fast as the industry benchmark growth rate, we've embraced the power of UX design to further refine our platform through research, user feedback, and iterative design processes.
By placing an emphasis on our user experience, we've been able to simplify complex tasks, meet diverse user needs, and ultimately deliver a product that not only meets but exceeds our customers' expectations. As we continue to innovate, the principles of good UX will remain at the core of our approach, driving ongoing improvements and ensuring that our platform evolves in ways that truly benefit our users.