Universal Insurance
Research & Design/ 2018
Summary
Challenge
How might we make home insurance processes and policies easier to navigate? How might we stand out amid a crowded insurance market and better express our brand promise?
Context
Universal Insurance, a national home insurance provider, approached Agenda NYC to recreate the web presence for three websites that hadn’t been updated in over a decade: two for consumers and one for investors. We redesigned their websites to better serve the people they work with and stand out in a saturated Florida home insurance market.
Outcome
Three redesigned websites that help people navigate complex home insurance processes – such as filing claims and understanding policies – with ease.
My Role
UX Researcher and Designer with a design director, content strategist, visual designer, account manager, and studio president. I developed & led client workshops, conducted field research with policyholders and agents, planned our analysis & co-design workshops, mapped content, and developed wireframes, information architecture, and interaction design direction.
Redesigned site for Universal Insurance Holdings, the investor-focused website
Process
Methods & Tools
One week of on-site workshops based on the design sprint methodology to bring together disparate stakeholders and introduce them to a design-first approach
Competitive & comparative analysis to survey the insurance landscape and gain inspiration from adjacent digital product & service innovators
Field interviews with insurance agents, employees, and policyholders to understand processes, reasoning, and decision-making processes
Contextual inquiry to observe the claim filing and policy shopping processes
Content audit & mapping to inform site & page structures and components, based on the needs of different people (policyholders, agents)
Research readout summarizing our research, workshop activities, and recommendations to a broad audience at the company
Prototyping to demonstrate proposed interaction patterns across different concepts
Research Questions
We needed to make home insurance policies and processes easier to understand and to bring the personal experience through in our redesign. Our UX areas of focus were:
Painless processes: how can we make the sign-up and claims processes easier to navigate & understand?
Education & empowerment: how can we provide people with just the right amount of information when and where they need it during the process?
Value & recognition: How might we convey our value and better serve our current and future customers and partners?
Research Approach
Workshops
Before flying down to Florida, we assembled a series of design and discovery workshops based loosely on Google Ventures’ Design Sprints. Our schedule alternated stakeholder & employee interviews with activities including journey mapping and a collaborative design studio, designed to help our clients empathize with their business's customers and partners.
I led a sketching lesson and design studio and loved seeing the team move from hesitant to developing their own creative ideas, translating their expertise into potential solutions for our proto-personas.
Getting ideas out on paper through design studio sketching revealed hidden processes and information that helped us refine our interview questions.
Competitive & Comparative Research
Competitive research showed users frequently opted for large, multi-line insurance companies that provided cheaper, bundled rates and a sense of trust due to name recognition. “Insurtech” startups like Lemonade also posed a threat by offering quick, simple signup processes and making home insurance feel approachable. Home insurance customers seemed to be shifting more towards self-service processes that eliminated insurance experts like agents.
Proto-Personas
We developed proto-personas as part of a client workshop to create a shared understanding of the people we would be designing for and refine our field interview topics. Universal’s consumer site primarily served current and future policyholders at either end of the tech literacy spectrum, as well as agents who could use the site's resources to build stronger relationships with their clients.
Policyholders: concerned with understanding their coverage options or navigating the claims process in case of damage.
Agents: needed easy-to-find information to help their clients and resources to grow their business, especially for junior agents.
Employees (such as Adjusters): needed ways to help people prepare the right materials to help with their claims and minimize calls, visits, and faxes so they could help people rebuild faster
What incites the need for a new home insurance provider, how people research their options, and how they manage their policies on a regular basis
Field Research
A visit to a local agent’s office brought to life the saturated insurance market in Florida & indications of how Universal might stand out.
We interviewed policyholders, agents, stakeholders, and employees to get an understanding of their thought processes around choosing insurance and the unique brand values we could translate through the redesign.
“When I go out and have my red elephant on, people recognize it.”
Despite a crowded market for home insurance in Florida, people recognized Universal as a company that put people first thanks to their customer service and innovations like a rapid-response Fast Track claims team which got people their first check to rebuild in 48 hours.
Policyholders (or even their neighbors) would come up to gush to adjusters wearing their red elephant logo hats about how the company helped them rebuild.
Agents trusted them as an insurance company that had–quite literally–weathered every storm over the past 20 years. Other companies collapsed when major disasters struck, creating customer service crises and damaging people’s trust in their agents.
Synthesis & Analysis
Key Insights
People knew they didn't understand home insurance but didn't necessarily trust the information they found. They expected companies to care more about saving money than helping customers in times of crisis, felt highly emotional after catastrophe struck, and couldn’t comprehend policy details or complicated claims processes.
The form factors for service & information matter even more during a crisis. When people need to refer to important policy details and documents while filing a claim, the resources they found were presented in “PDF graveyards.” These can’t be easily accessed on mobile devices when they’ve lost power after a storm and add to frustrations and delays.
People valued a personal, human touch – and that's what Universal was known for. Seeing our client’s mascot on a truck or shirt stirred an emotional association in people – they would come up to employees and tell stories of how the company had helped them or a neighbor to rebuild their lives after their homes had been damaged or destroyed.
These insights informed our design principles to guide our design decisions.
Design Principles
Transparency & simplicity are key. Helping people understand information and claims processes on their own, without the need for expert translation or a phone call, would build trust in Universal.
Be a resource. Sharing the expertise Universal has built over 20 years would create value for customers and highlight their stability in the industry.
Highlight the human side. Universal was known for its service and care, so we needed to bring that feeling through the redesign.
Outcome
Identity & Design Language
Highlight the human side.
We brought the key brand messages and differentiation points front and center on the home page, along with actions like filing a claim or finding an agent. Along with simple & direct language, this reflected Universal’s more open and friendly brand image.
Resources
Be a resource for “Understanding Insurance.”
Since the nuances of home insurance are both foreign and boring to most people, we wanted to present information in an engaging, discoverable way that allowed people to navigate questions and topics they wouldn’t have known to search for.
Most insurance providers presented information in blog format or an “information dump”, where people would need to endlessly scroll up and down or click back and forth between content and collections.
Based on our research, we knew people sought out information related to their unique situation:
specific life stages, such as being a new homeowner
circumstances, such as home repairs after a storm
We designed the Resource pages to easily guide people through the most important things they needed to know at each stage using our client’s unique expertise.
We recommended developing resources for both policyholders (understanding insurance) and agents (understanding what Universal had to offer), including an insurance terminology dictionary to demystify policy terms and documents.
Filing a Claim
Transparency & simplicity are key.
The revised Claims page.
We recommended providing information upfront about what people needed to get through the claims process, like policy numbers and photos of damage so they could collect what they needed to complete the process without interruption. During high-stress moments like the emotional experience of experiencing damage to or loss of one’s home, we needed to make processes clear, simple, and quick.
We reduced the number of clicks to reach the “File a Claim” form from six to two and ensured it was accessible on mobile devices, which was especially important for people who might only have access to their phones after losing the contents of their homes to a disaster.
The old claims was completely inaccessible on mobile.
Impact
Our stakeholders started to refer to the personas by name during our sessions at the end when discussing different content and strategy options, advocating for Glenn's (current policyholder) or Casey's (a new agent) needs.
After returning to New York, the C-suite team reached out to express appreciation for the impact the workshops made on their team and company as a whole, teaching them how to empathize with their customers on a new level and apply strategic design thinking to larger restructuring efforts within the company.
Our work also won us a new contract to develop the brand identity, experience strategy, and design for an educational insurance site, Clovered. I helped with research and design for the site.
