Haven Insurance
Client: Student Project for Designlab
Sector: Insurance
My Role: End-to-end design from research to conception to visual prototyping to testing.
Project Time: 10 weeks
Haven insurance has been a successful b2b insurance company for over 30 years. Unlike traditional insurance companies, Haven uses pre-made plans and has over 350 to choose from. Practically this means better coverage at a cheaper rate for their customers. Recognizing the shift in the market with the rise of tech-surance Haven is looking to transition to a b2c company and utilize a responsive e-commerce website to connect directly with their new clients
High-Level Goals
Refresh Haven’s brand and logo to feel modern and fresh while remaining trustworthy
To create a responsive web platform that delights its customers in their search for insurance.
The platform should be approachable and offer easy ways to search through the various insurance options.
I started my research phase by coming up with a list of questions broken into 3 categories
User needs
What the competition is doing
The state of the industry at large
Insurance is a complex industry with some companies that have been around for a century. I discovered that like most industries right now the traditional insurance model is seeing disruption from tech-forward, surgically focused companies.
Main Research Objective
To discover what makes customers trust their insurance company and how they would like to explore insurance offerings options in a digital space.
Secondary Questions
How do people choose their insurance?
What events inspire a need for insurance?
What are the biggest points of friction when trying to purchase insurance?
What do people fear about choosing insurance?
What does an insurance win look like?
Existing Competitors
After exploring various companies, I shortlisted five that represented different facets and brand styles and then mapped out their general strengths and weaknesses.
After synthesizing my research about what the industry looks like and how many companies are working I still felt I had some major gaps in my knowledge of how people actually felt about insurance. I was seeing the effects (the experience of various company sites or industry trends) but not the cause of the users that these companies were responding to. I went back to my initial research needs and used them to create a broader generative outline of questions for users.
Research Conclusions
After remote interviews with four target users, I synthesized all my research down to some big conclusions:
It's not just price
While I assumed the low price was essential, price is only one gatekeeping factor; coverage and customer service are equally weighted in the end. Users were willing to pay a bit more to feel safer.
Insurance feels exhausting
Insider jargon, complex plans, long web forms, and infinite choices are stressful. Industry-wide users will consider a small set of companies and spend an hour or two at most doing research.
Buying takes too much time
Despite initial ideas of reorganizing how users approach insurance categories, users proved that clarity and ease are most important.
Trustworthy = Transparency
The most common word used to describe a trustworthy company was transparent. Users had a lot of fears and anxieties about not understanding both products and how the company worked.
Turning fears into goals
I wanted to leverage this very generative research phase into something actionable moving forward. I began with an empathy map to shift focus to the user and their experiences with insurance. Started with sensory inputs I was able to move into solidifying some essential pains and gains. With the research and empathy map, I was finally able to focus all the answers to my initial research questions into a persona and a storyboard.
I leveraged both of these tools to think about what features would most appeal to the goals and fears of my target users.
Organizing for approachability
My biggest challenge at this phase felt like balancing the site’s main business value, selling insurance plans, with its other essential features: containing plan information/paperwork, claims filing and follow-up, contacting an agent, and educating its customers. There are also sorts of smaller features like roadside assistance.
I learned quickly using a card sort both that users did not want any non-traditional ways of site organization and that my own taxonomy needed improvement. My card sort and research reinforced that users really want anything to do with insurance to be exactly in the most straightforward place it should be. Some of my potential page names were also far too similar or unclear in the role they would play throughout the site, leading to some pretty split decisions in site organization based on how my users interpreted them.
Based on the site map I worked out what I considered the most essential flow for the business, the process of a user arriving on the site to buying an insurance plan. Then I mapped out a much wider user flow to explore how the larger features I had planned would play into the overall site map.
While my user flow explored a number of avenues a user could take to get there, I wireframed out only the most essential insurance quote process.
Building a brand
In approaching branding I went back to my persona and pulled out some keywords for what king of feelings my user may be attracted to:
Modern
Secure
Playful
Approachable
After some experimenting, I choose a simplistic idea of coverage (or protection) to have the logo embody.
As I prepared to build the high-fidelity comps I took a moment to reflect back on my ideas about making the insurance experience more like buying a computer. I had pulled out some design patterns I’d seen on lots of responsive insurance sites but didn’t feel they captured what my users were looking for. So I branched out to look at finance sites thinking that they were companies selling complex ideas, that wanted to be approachable, but trustworthy.
Creation is destruction
I experimented with a number of different versions of the hero sections within the brand constraints I was starting to build. In the end, my research’s continuous reinforcement of how straightforward users wanted insurance to be lead me to work for a friendly but minimal approach.
How approachable is it?
Using Figma I prototyped out a mid-fidelity prototype and ran usability testing both virtually and in person. Unlike my initial user interviews, I branched out of my typical user group age range to see what different users might notice.
Major Successes
The brand, the main user flow, and the landing page were very successful. Users were consistently able to identify essential information, knew how to navigate the pages, and were able to “purchase” a policy
Call-To-Action
I learned a good deal about CTA writing and functionality. What I had assumed was a straightforward function, was confusing to the users for a number of reasons. It all reinforced my initial research of how straightforward users want insurance to be. Cute CTA’s like “Get Started” sent my users off hunting for other paths. Adding the word quote to the main CTA was like a magnet.
Final thoughts and next steps
After making some priority redesigns based on usability testing this project ended for me. If I building this project out for real my next goals would be divided more into sprints since the core UI kit is built:
User flows, wireframe, and full UI for- Claims Flow, Agent Contact Flow, Coverage Quiz Flow, Account login/pages Flow, Auto Insurance Flow, Home Insurance Flow, Bundled Flow, and any additional one-off information pages
Usability Testing for additional flows and high fidelity prototype
Based on my initial feature mapping this would be the MVP ready for handoff to developers.