eApplication Redesign
platform
Web (Desktop and Mobile)
team
User Research Lead, Product Designer, Software Engineer, and Product Managers
role
Product Design Manager
UX Design • 2021
Overview
iptiQ sells life and health insurance products through an end-to-end digital platform directly to consumers through subsidiary brands (Lumico) and in partnership with insurance brokers. The eApplication purpose is to enable users to quickly receive real-time quotes and enroll in life and health insurance policies with instant approvals.
Problem
Agent trust in the iptiQ digital insurance platform has deteriorated due to the eApplication’s slow application process, usability issues, and inconsistent user experience. Because of the negative experience, usage and conversion rates have dropped significantly.
Objective
Discover opportunities, ideate, and design end-to-end solutions to increase conversion and adoption rates of the eApplication by 30%
learning
Building empathy and identifying user pain points
At the start of this project, we lacked any user research to help build empathy, validate assumptions, and ensure we were solving the right problem. I worked with my user research lead to plan an intensive co-discovery sprint involving our Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, and subject matter experts. Our team surveyed 1,800 users domestically, conducted twelve one-on-one interviews, and led several focus groups.
The key insights from the research helped us validate assumptions and narrow down the scope of the problems. Only 52% of agents were satisfied with selling Lumico products overall. One of the main drivers of dissatisfaction was the time it took to close a sale.
"I've stopped recommending Lumico to my clients because the application constantly errors out, which then requires me to call agent support. When the application does work, it takes significantly longer than your competitors"
- Anonynous Life Insurance Agent
Agents confirmed our assumption that the digital application is one of the most important deciding factors when recommending an insurance company to a client (outside of availability and price). The overall eApplication only received a 53% satisfaction rating, and participants rated our product significantly lower than our competitors.
To understand how our experience compared to our competitors, I tasked our product designer with a competitive analysis comparing our eApplication to other life and health insurance competitors.
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The key takeaways from the analysis were that our competitors had a simplified signature process, a fast approval process, transparent pricing, and easily digestible content.
Putting it all together and defining clear user problems
The team threaded the user research, personas, and competitive analysis into clearly defined user problems to prioritize and solve.
I partnered with our user researcher to create several user personas highlighting user goals, needs, challenges, and values. I shared these personas broadly across the cross-functional teams and business stakeholders to help build empathy for our users. After creating personas, I led a workshop that mapped out each persona's journey focusing on their end-to-end sales experience, user pain points, and opportunities.
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The outcome was that our cross-functional teams would use these journey maps to consider the holistic problem, including any downstream implications to solutions, and prioritize the top user problems. Our team aligned on three user problems that we wanted to ideate and test:
User Problem #1: Pricing Transparency
Users could not view premium changes while completing the application, making it challenging to quickly explain cost differences to their clients.
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User Problem #2: Signature Process Failures
Users could not complete the application because they experienced a high failure rate with the existing voice and electronic signature process.
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User Problem #3: Content Unreadable
Users had difficulty reading the application questions because there was a lack of clear content hierarchy, and the language used was confusing.
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exploration
Collaborating and exploring design solutions
The next step was brainstorming, ideating, and exploring concepts that would resolve the user's problems.
We had a tight timeline and needed a way to get our cross-functional team involved in co-creating the concepts. I proposed a five-day design sprint to create a testable solution that would be a measurable improvement. I received positive interest in trying a new approach, but stakeholders pushed back on the number of resources needed and the time commitment.
I convinced senior leaders by selling the main point that the design approach enabled us to focus time on solving all three user problems rather than a separate session for each opportunity. I negotiated to do a two-day design studio session and reduce the number of participants in the session. Before the session, we provided all the participants with a design brief, user research, personas, and user journeys.
The HMW we used for our design studio was:
"How might we empower agents with the right information to make a sale and decrease the time it takes to complete the life and health application?"
The design studio team came up with the following concepts:
Overview Card
Created an overview card allowing users to view customer details and an estimated cost as they progressed through the eApplication.
V1: Users desired an ability to see an overview of their client details.
V2: Added client personal details and placed content horizontal to the titles to utilize the space.
V3: Displayed the difference in cost versus initial quote.
Signature Option
A new signature concept to reduce the number of steps and hand-offs between the user and client.
Original: Electronic Signature
Concept: Security Question
Content Redesign
Conducted a content audit and partnered with a content specialist to write clear and easy-to-understand instructions and questions.
materialize
Establishing design language and approach
Before starting to design, we needed to identify our design language, visual identity, and technical constraints. There was no design system, documentation, brand guidelines, stylesheet, or component library for the original design. The team needed a defined and scalable way to design the screens for the prototype, and without an existing design system, it would take our team much longer to create the screens.
I reached out to other design teams, and in parallel to this project, we partnered to build the initial foundations of an organization-wide "design system." While this was not a fully comprehensive design system with code, atomic components, documentation, and a design operations team to support, it filled our immediate project needs at the time.
We redesigned the eApplication using the new iptiQ design system in desktop and mobile versions. The new design meets the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines. Below are the desktop and mobile versions of the new design.
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The features highlighted below focus on solving for user problems we identified above:
Overview
Allow users to view client and product details easily all-in-one place. As users complete the application, the estimated cost adjust based on their client's responses:
Security Question
The new security question option reduced the number of steps to sign an eApplication. The time to sign an application decreased from an average of 5 minutes to less than 1 minute and reduced failure rates by 87%.
Content Redesign
The new card presentation improved user focus by highlighting active questions and reducing the visibility of inactive questions. New questions and instructions are simple and easy to digest.
Conducted qualitative and quantitative user testing
Due to the significant changes to the look and feel of the product, I partnered with our market research team to conduct an A/B test comparing initial users' perceptions of the original design versus the new design in five dimensions: satisfaction, desirability, trustworthiness, professionalism, and how engaging the designs were in the initial view. The test was a quick gauge that we were heading in the right direction from a marketing and branding perspective.
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Next, I partnered with our user researcher to conduct usability studies to measure success, satisfaction, and ease of use for critical tasks such as completing the eApplication, receiving a quote, and completing the signature process. The test results showed that users had an easier time completing the signature process, answering application questions, and being satisfied with the ability to see real-time price estimates.
"I love being able to see when how the quote changes. The application process is much faster and the questions feel more natural."
- Anonynous Life Insurance Agent
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results
Quantifiable and non-quantifiable results and impact from the project
As a recap, our original objective was to discover opportunities, ideate, and design end-to-end solutions to increase conversion and adoption rates of the eApplication by 30%
Our initial results showed an increase in usage of the eApplication by 38%, and conversion rates increased by 30%.
The eApplication redesign overall success rates increased by 33%, satisfaction increased by 33%, ease of use ratings increased by 18%, and completion times decreased by 25%.
Changed the culture of the cross-functional team by educating, co-discovering, and co-creating solutions focused on the user. Balancing user and business needs is now part of every conversation.
Cross-functional and business leadership saw design as a strategic partner, and design maturity in the company rose. Headcount was approved to increase the team by 3x.
