Research

The average person knows nothing about how insurance actually works, myself included. Understanding the industry thoroughly was crucial to translating insurance jargon into sentences that actually make sense. 

Through external secondary research not only did I learn what a deductible was (am I kidding? You’ll never know), but I was able to understand the current trends in insurance industry more thoroughly. 

Some key findings

👆 Everything is available at the tip of your fingertips. Not only do insurance companies have responsive websites, but all of them have apps. This is useful in checking claims, viewing your account, and even earning rewards. 

☎️ Contact us, we BEG you. Email, phone, instant chat. There are so many ways to get ahold of  agents at these companies. There’s often several banners around the site letting you know to contact them for claims or setting up an account. 

🤯 Information overload. There are so many choices when it comes to picking an insurance, and often times these companies don’t have a effective way of organizing that information for the consumer.

Kaus vs the other insurance giants

Along with my secondary research, I conducted a competitor analysis with key insurance companies to learn the ins and outs of how our competition works, and identify potential opportunities in which we can outperform them.

Let’s Interview the Users

Now that I was educated about how the insurance industry runs, I needed the input of the consumers. I recruited a total of 3 participants for an in-depth, in-person interview to learn more about their perceptions, experiences, frustrations, and needs.

Here’s what they had to say -

INSERT IMAGE OF QUOTES

Once the interviews were completed, I created an Interview Debrief where I was able to analyze the key information.Taking this research into account, here are some key design applications based on the users wants, needs, and frustrations

• Having a live chat feature is very important to all three users, which is something to include on the home page. An option to call an agent would be helpful in addition.

• Ease of navigation is important, clear headers for filing a claim and information on policies would be helpful.

• All three showed a lack of trust. Designing the homepage around transparency about the company and/or policies could help with that. Possibly some reviews, a word of mouth referral discount on a policy, etc

• Simplifying the information overload would be helpful, since all interviewees viewed insurance as something that is confusing and a hassle.

Now that we’ve gotten all that research out of the way, whew, time to make those design building blocks.

Define

Persona

After all the research conducted, we know exactly who we’re designing for, this Persona helps guide the entirety of the design.

Sitemap

So what exactly will Kaus include? I drafted the bones of Kaus based on a card sorting exercise with 4 test subjects. Based on their feedback, I was able to group key elements together to make navigation clear.

Task Flow

Working off the sitemap, the task flow was created. The task flow shows how the average user would complete an insurance purchase from our interactive quote. Starting at their google search, ending with new insurance. When we think about the user journey, we think about what information their looking to find and their goals for exploring our site.

User Flow

Taking both the sitemap and task flow into account, we now have our user flows. I thought about the different journeys the user would take to reach the endpoint, purchasing insurance online. Understanding this paths and actions that take place, helps us pave the way for the user to reach their goal.

Now that we’ve defined the perimeters based on the user goals, it’s time for it to all come together. 

Design

Sketching

Now that we’ve drawn out the problem, it’s time to sketch out the solution. Through sketching, I was able to filter out both the bad solutions and keep the good ones. The goal here was to make an abundance of information approachable, easy to read, and easy to navigate.

Wireframing

My favorite part, making ideas come to life. After analyzing and selecting components from my sketches, I was able to create mid-fi wireframes. I wanted to focus on not only creating a solid foundation, but a design that would be responsive as well.

UI Kit

Fun, modern, clean. I wanted Kaus to reflect the updated way of insurance shopping. I chose two main colors, blue and orange. Blue to create trust and calm, with the secondary color being orange. The san serif font was chosen to reflect a product that’s modern and up to date. These work together to create the foundation of the UI kit here.

Hi-Fi Wireframes

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Testing 1, 2, 3?!

We have our prototype ready to go, now let’s run some usability tests. I have 4 major objective when testing the prototype.

Objectives

1. Test if or when the CTA is used during their visit on Kaus.

2. Observe if the pages give enough detail or provide enough trust to purchase insurance.

3. See if the participants would like to browse any other pages in their journey to complete the CTA.

4. Notice any errors or confusion when navigating the prototype.

Overall, the users were able to complete the task with a 100% completion rate. There were navigation notes and feedback from all 3 users, which can be found in depth in my Usability Test Findings.

Priority Revisions

Based off the results from the usability tests, I created an affinity map and prioritization matrix to organize and prioritize these revisions from urgent to noncritical. There seemed to be 3 priority revisions that were key in optimizing the user flow.

1. Input fields

2. CTA wording edit

3. Directing the user scroll

Next Steps

Make Additional Adjustments - After creating the affinity map and correcting the urgent adjustments, starting to make the rest of the changes on the list.

Test, Test, Test - We’re never done testing here. Conducting more user tests for different flows to ensure everything is running smoothly.