This personal project case study covers end-to-end UX design for a responsive insurance site to expand the company's reach to Millennials who tend to prefer purchasing insurance online.
My design was guided by my user research data, prioritizing user control and easing their cognitive load by consolidating information and utilizing wizard forms. The goal was to uncomplicate an infamously complicated purchasing process, and testing participants reported that the process felt significantly easier than their previous experiences.
Along with a few other research methods, I conducted one phone and four in-person interviews, asking about understanding and usage of insurance as well as experiences purchasing it.
Some of the same user pain points kept popping up:
Purchasing takes a long time and is confusing, so it gets put off and stretched out over several days.
They dislike having to give their information and take multiple steps in order to see a quote.
They prefer to only purchase policies they see an immediate need for, usually related to negative outcomes from lack of coverage in the past.
They don't want to talk to anyone, especially because an agent might try to upsell them.
The persona "Emily" is a conglomeration of my research data: she's a super careful spender, likes making informed decisions, and doesn't want to be coerced into more insurance than she believes she needs.
This storyboard illustrates a life circumstance that could instigate an insurance search and purchase for Emily.
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Purchasing insurance felt like a laborious, confusing and deceptive process to my interviewees. Keeping my persona Emily in mind, I created two main goals to address business and user pain points:
I created a user flow to help determine necessary features, conducted a card sort to see which categories customers might expect to find certain types of insurance under, and then created a site map, which went through a few iterations during the design process.
Ease the customer's cognitive load to keep them engaged from start to finish so they don't bounce.
Provide education, personal control, and price transparency to increase trust and loyalty.
Card sorting participants organized types of insurance into four main categories, which I named Home, Auto, Wellness and Everything Else (a catch-all for random insurances).
During interviews I learned that people were switching between mobile and desktop with multiple tabs open, which was confusing and chaotic, so I implemented a single resource page to keep all information centrally located.
Resource Page
I also added a chat autobot to assist with questions, for those that don't want to call the helpline, which might be everyone.
Chatbot AI
Another move toward simplicity came with a Wizard Form for the complete quote and purchase process. The result was a customization page to adjust coverage amounts and see price changes in real time.
Wizard Form
When I tested the Everything Page and Wizard Form quote process prototypes, there was a 100% completion rate with minimal errors, though some folks were unsure where to find a section on the customization page. Clarifying categories could be helpful as customers navigate that section.
There was a lot of feedback about how friendly, easy and streamlined it felt to move through the steps. A few testers ruefully anticipated having to talk to someone or give their email before getting their quote, so I realized I needed to add copy explicitly alleviating that pain point ahead of time.
A few other iterations with the progress bar, condensing the homepage hero to encourage scrolling, and adding a comparison chart option helped improve the design as well.