Modernize Insurance Portal and Align with Agents’ Workflows

Problem

CIG’s agent portal was antiquated, lacking a modern feel. It was difficult for agents to navigate and get their work done efficiently while supporting their clients.

Skills Used

User Research | User Testing | Visual Design | Project Management | Requirement Documentation

The Story

Capital Insurance Group (CIG), a regional insurance provider headquartered in Monterey, California, was in the midst of updating its technology infrastructure, including both internal and external-facing systems. I was brought on board to leverage my user-centered design approach and software development experience to support CIG's software teams. Thanks to strong partnerships with the business team, we had direct access to insurance agents for research purposes, which further enhanced these relationships. This collaboration provided an invaluable opportunity for user testing and interviews, which played a crucial role in shaping the development of the new agent-facing front-end system.

My role: User Experience Designer, Visual Designer, Business Analyst
Platform: Desktop Web

 

Project Vision

Our project vision was to deliver an online agent experience that was on par with its peers and enabled agents to more easily conduct business online with CIG. Our goal was to have an updated website design that allowed agents to use the platform in a way familiar to them, with user experience improvements and streamlined journeys for their most common needs.

First and only UX Designer: The UX designer position at CIG was new so I wanted to be clear about what work was important and why. I created a UX project plan to clearly communicate my approach. I owned and lead the UX activities that needed to happen to help the project team and executives fully understand what the current portal was doing for our customers and where improvements were needed. As part of this project I also documented and shared my UX knowledge and passion with teammates to infuse it into our way of work.

Visual Design: My role was to explore different visual design approaches to solve UI needs and provide the development team with the UI elements, specs, and information needed for implementation.

Business Analyst: My role was to create Jira cards for development work with user stories and front-end specs and requirements.

UX Project Plan

 

Discovery

Tasks performed:

  • Performed competitive analysis and documentation of the information architecture of top competitor sites to gain a better understanding of how their agent facing portals functioned. 

  • Created a user interview how-to document and shared out information with teammates. 

  • Created three user personas based on the research and shared and discussed them with the team

I needed to better understand the insurance industry and how the agent and insurance carrier business relationship functioned. Some field study research had been performed prior to me joining the team. I was able to comb through their research notes and screenshots to help inform my discovery phase tasks.

Through research and internal interviews, three user personas were created. These personas helped in design and development discussions to ensure we were keeping real users in mind and not building for ourselves. The process of creating the personas provided me with so much information about the industry, the history of it, the process, and the goals and drivers of the customer/users. We used the user personas to help guide us to have even coverage in our usability tests. 

Primary and secondary user personas

 

Exploration

Tasks performed:

My role at CIG also included some business analyst tasks like requirement gathering. To make sure we understood all of the current site capabilities I did a task analysis exercise to document current site areas and actions as well as the common user needs. This exercise and documentation helped further my understanding of the business and process. We used this document to help us better understand the primary user tasks and drivers behind them. I also used this document to help us write requirements and define our minimum viable product.

Task analysis documentation

 

Visual Design

Tasks performed:

  • Designed site color theme based on company brand standards

  • Designed all new site style and page layouts

  • Built component library in Sketch

  • Created clickable prototypes for reviews and user testing

  • Created UI spec sheets and assets provided via Jira along with written requirements

Based on the research done and the current state of the new user interface, I began suggesting UI improvements. I created prototypes that would get internally reviewed, including quick mock-user testing with business team partners, before getting tasked to development.

Error page design

Spec sheets provided to development

 

Testing

Tasks performed:

I was so excited to get the chance to perform usability testing and this was a great opportunity for it. I lead the organizing and planning with the help of two great business analysts and the support of management. I lead each usability session with a business analyst supporting. For each session there was an interview part of it to get detail and big picture understanding of the customer and the business. A usability test exercise was also part of each session. We did remote usability tests with the user accessing a specific link and sharing their screen. I created a testing plan that we followed for each test and both business analyst and myself documented notes that we reviewed and compiled afterwards. 

We gained good insights from the usability testing and found some great opportunities for improvement. I created a usability test report to document the process, our findings, and suggestions. 

Based on our testing results, I provided suggestions for improvements. I created a proposal document for getting stakeholder approval and then for informing requirements.

Slides from UI Proposal presentation. View full proposal >>

 

Listening

Tasks performed:

I wanted to make sure that when this went live we were ready to start observing usage behaviors. I created a plan so that we wouldn’t have to work to get meaning out of the data. I wanted to have something in place for a regular review of user interactions and site metrics that would allow us to have continual insight into how the site was performing and how user interactions were aligning with the site objectives and business goals. I documented our goals and determined which signals and metrics would help determine if that goal was met or not and how they were tracking over time.

 

Outcome

CIG was bought by a larger insurance company and they used a 3rd-party insurance software product for their portal. This project was halted and our new agent facing UI did not go into production.

Although, our work was not introduced to agent customers we learned a great amount in our interviews and user testing. The knowledge we gained would still be useful while we started to learn about and implement the 3rd-party software.