introducing ux to an organization

DISTINGUISHED PROGRAMS

THE PRODUCT:

A portal used by clients to apply for, purchase, and manage different kinds of insurance. The portal is also used internally for account management.

Each type of insurance is considered a “sub-product” within the portal and was onboarded at differing times and in differing states.

the project:

After a decade of continuous customization on a white-label product with no iterative design process, the portal suffered from serious UX debt. Years of building on top of a shaky foundation and no design standards culminated in a clunky, frustrating, and inconsistent user experience for our clients.

Working with a scrappy, but severely understaffed engineering team, and an organization interacting with their first in-house product designer, we decided that in order to change the tide, we would have to start small, and from within.

my role:

Product Designer / Sprint Manager

Methods:

User Interviews, User Testing, Iterative Solutioning, Wireframing & Prototyping

Tools:

Sketch, Invision, Adobe Creative Suite, Azure DevOps

problem:

The well-being and usability of the overall platform was largely ignored. Instead, resources were placed on building out new features or fixes for individual sub-products without regard for uniformity or consistency in experience or visual design across sub-products.

goalS:

1) Establish Agile development and design processes

2) Familiarize the organization with UX and build a product roadmap

3) Document the current state of the platform, and look for small, incremental, UX enhancements.

The first order of business was helping an engineering team so overwhelmed with demands from the rest of the organization start steering their own ship again. Scrum and agile practices were implemented, and sprints were once again being planned and managed.

Next came the documentation pulling together resources from operations, product owners, marketing, customer experience, and underwriters to accurately understand what the current state of the union was.

We started on the hunt for something that seemed almost mythical — small, incremental, and high-impact UX enhancements.

Research:

Competitive Landscape

Although the Insurance industry as a whole is still playing catch-up on implementing and utilizing modern technology solutions seen in other sectors, there are plenty of direct competitors and parallel products that offer a glimpse of where the portal could be in the long-term. Parallel products like other application management systems, e-commerce and digital marketplaces provide insight into UX/UI trends and norms that users might expect.

User Feedback & Interviews

Feedback for the overall product, as well as for individual processes, segments, and projects were conducted to understand where our users were most frustrated, and why. The feedback combined with problems that surfaced from our documentation process culminated into a bank of mini-projects that were relatively low-effort and could effectively demonstrate the value of UX to the organization.

Mini-Projects

Make consistent with the marketing site menu
Show users the industries and products we offer
Help new and experienced users find what they need more quickly

Get rid of dead clicks - make the entire button clickable
Add clear error messaging - no more pop-ups!
Increase field and font size for legibility

Before:
1.7 dead clicks in a month on the Sign In button because the text "SIGN IN" was the only clickable thing as opposed to the entire button being clickable.