KAUS insurance has covered a wide range of policies through brokers for over 30 years. They now want to rebrand and make their policies accessible to a growing digital generation. They aim to extend their services online and promote their bundled deals to keep prices low while providing easy solutions for their customers.
KAUS insurance offers a wide range of products which poses the challenge of sorting them into their respective on top of understanding what bundles make the most sense. The website must cater to those who bundle and those who chose not to. Furthermore, the quote process must be executed in a way that users understand what they are signing up for while ensuring success even after checkout.
• Implement a scheduling and reminder system
• Recommend daily mindfulness reminders to meditate
• Create a mindful product that puts users at ease upon use
Before jumping straight into a solution, it is crucial to understand nature of the problem by gathering data through market research and empathizing with our target demographic. The scope will include desk research on insurance industries, an analysis on KAUS’ competitors and a deep dive into the needs and desires of the end-users.
Market Research was carried out to gain insights of the target markets of insurance companies offering their services online and to uncover trends and opportunities within the market.
A Competitive analysis was conducted to unmask the strengths and weaknesses of the main players in the insurance industry as well as study their commonalities.
With the findings from desk research, I created provisional personas to identify possible consumers of insurance and their needs.
User Interview participants with the below criteria were recruited online for user interviews:
All participants held a negative impression of insurance and admiitted that they don’t make the most out of their policies:
It was now time to condense our research data with empathy to understand the end-user’s common goals, needs and behaviors.
Hello Natalie! She is the amalgam of the user interview participants. Natalie will guide us through the design process so our decisions along the way are aligned with the end-user’s goals and tackles the problems that need to be solved.
To get a closer look at Natalie, an empathy map was made based on the collected data and observations in order to generate insights towards identifying and understanding her needs and problems.
Although understanding Natalie’s goals and needs is important, turning them into actionable problems statements is a crucial step to creating the right solutions for her needs:
Now that our problem statement has been defined, it was time to determine the requirements.
During research, I have accumulated a list of common insurance policies and asked 7 participants to do an unmoderated open card sorting exercise online. In other words, each participant was asked to sort out all the insurance from the list provided and give each category a name that made the most sense to them.
Based on the results, the categories have been determined as:
To ensure that the product not only makes consumers happy but continues as a sustainable business, I made sure to identify the business, user and technical goals to create a something that benefits everyone. Based on those project goals, I have created a feature roadmap to establish the Must-Have Features to make a reliable website fully functional to do what its meant to do.
Now that the insurance categories and site features have been decided, I created a sitemap to get a bird’s eye view of how the pages will be prioritized, linked and labeled.
At this stage, I started by creating a task flow of how a user can purchase insurance from our website.
It is just as important to identify the possible routes Natalie will take in order to achieve her goal. Taking her behaviors and actions into consideration, I have created a user flow to find out how Natalie will be purchasing insurance from our website.
To quickly come up with layouts that made sense, I started out by roughly sketching out a few patterns before proceeding to digitizing them. After receiving some feedback, I have dissected the parts of each pattern to create a starting point.
To quickly come up with layouts that made sense, I started out by roughly sketching out a few patterns before proceeding to digitizing them. After receiving some feedback, I have dissected the parts of each pattern from the sketches to create a starting point for my responsive low fidelity wireframes shown below:
Further, I’ve annotated my wireframes to provide the context behind my design decision and you can find the full details here.
Since I wanted to dispel the negative impression of insurance in general, I created a moodboard to show KAUS as an experience that is reliable, supportive and trustworthy.
Staying true to the brand attributes, I’ve chose the brand color to be a deep blue. The color blue is well-accepted for both female and male users and promotes the feeling of peace, stability and trust. I have chosen orange as a secondary color as it pairs greatly with blue and symbolizes optimism and freedom.
As for the Logo, I wanted to create a sense of trust for the company and sketched out as many until I felt that there was a good amount of potential to choose from.
I experimented with a few symbols that show protection and support such as umbrellas, a turtle’s hard shell, a shield and so forth. The roundness lilypad with the heart in the middle expressed a sense of sincerity and protection so I decided to move forward with this logo design.
To promote a friendly and welcoming feeling, I sketched and made some original illustrations.
On top of illustrations, I have created the category icons as well to tie in the overall look of the brand and ended up with the below UI kit:
Applying the brand guidelines and UI kit to build my high fidelity wireframes (shown below), I put them together into a limited prototype in preparation for usability testing.
Check out the prototype here.
Once the prototype was ready, I prepared for usability testing in order to determine whether the website works as intended with our target demographic. The test was conducted with 7 participants over a recorded Zoom call where they were given scenarios to complete specific tasks.
Task 1: Give your first impression of the website and what you would do
Task 2: Show how you would purchase car insurance
Task 3: Show how you would purchase a bundled insurance for your car and home
Once the usability test was over, I created an affinity map to organize related information and observations into distinct clusters. In doing so, the data is easier to synthesize and leads to meaningful insights.
There are still things that can be tested and improved on, including but not limited to:
Doing this project was interesting because I started out not being too familiar with insurance myself and learning that other people had a similar view towards it made me feel like this project was worthwhile.
What I enjoyed 😁
I enjoyed learning how to tackle real people’s concerns and backing them up gives me confidence as a designer.
My favorite moments 😊
As a doodler in my spare time, some of my favorite moments would be whenever I had the time to sketch things out such as the low fidelity wireframes, logos and illustrations.
My least favorite moment 😭
Documenting the recorded zoom sessions felt a bit tedious but I always find my future self thanking me at the end of the day!
Room for Improvement 🤔
I spent a lot of time perfecting the low fidelity wireframes and made few more versions before receiving feedback. Next time, I would budget my time more wisely and work on other tasks since I’ll be making changes after getting feedback anyways.
