The company was looking to realign the brand positioning of State Insurance. They wanted to reposition and target a new customer: the everyday Kiwi, whose lives were already overloaded and didn’t have time to worry about their insurance.
The promise to these users was clear: make insurance easy, understandable and available within their timeframe, not ours.
This project focused on the self-service portal where customers would come to perform tasks related to their insurance cover. My task was to redesign the experience to make it easier to use and set-up a strong foundation for a variety of larger project kicking off later that year.
Another challenge was to translate new brand styling supplied from an above-the-line agency, into the UI of the self-service portal. This UI library would then be utilized across the design team and then be used to get organizational buy-in for a future Design System
With support from an additional designer for UI work and the design team for any group work necessary.
I co-ordinated and led all areas of design which included: problem definition, prioritization, scoping, prototyping and UI design. I also led the analysis of quantitive and qualitative research to inform my decision making.
Given that most of our 500,000+ customer base interacted via multiple channels, I started off gathering quant and qual data from other teams in order to help answer this question.
My objective was to gather as much as possible at the start so I could highlight and prioritize areas that deliver value now, but not remain tone-deaf to future projects that coming in the pipeline. There was also a very low appetite to make large changes to backend functionality, so I needed to deliver this as an MVP approach.
When looking at both quant and qual data the areas where we could improve ease were:
Users who came to make payments on their existing policy, and users who came to make changes to their cover and account due to a life event
Based on these findings I worked with our Product Owner and an Engineer to whiteboard what solutions we could incorporate within the timeframe. Having the technical knowledge in the room during this time was extremely helpful as we were all able to react and iterate in the moment.
I also explored a new IA and and tested with recent employees of the company (due to internal constraints, I wasn’t able to test with our end users) to compare and measure success.
The first was to keep consistency with our above-the-line brand and the second was to ensure I was creating components that would meet a AA accessibility standard.
This type of inclusion is a personal passion of mine and meeting a standard like this hadn’t been attempted at the company before. Because of this, I decided to focus on meeting the necessary contrast standards in the UI library.
