How can we ensure a smooth online insurance shopping experience?
My Role: Senior UX Designer
Tools Used: Figma, Miro
The Problem
At American Family Insurance, one of the most important functions is converting shoppers into new customers. In this respect AFI is playing catch-up; despite being one of the older institutions in their industry, their Online Shopping experience was not highly rated and did not convert the numbers the business was hoping for.
The Research
One of the tools AFI relies on to gauge outside opinion is the annual J.D. Power & Associates rankings of insurance company experiences. Upon joining the team, the 2021 report had ranked AFI near the bottom as compared to their competitors when it came to their online shopping experience.
Working with an excellent research team, we determined that much of the significant exit rate our shopping experience exhibited could be attributed to two main factors:
- The tendency of the experience to not identify those users who are either ineligible for coverage, or who require more personalized assistance than the website could provide
- Asking for the same information multiple times throughout the process (i.e. name and address) without explaining why
The Experience
Priority was given to correcting the two issues mentioned above. The situations where a given answer would prevent a user from completing the buy process were moved up in the flow, wasting less time for users who would end up not qualifying online. For the rest, we worked with a Content Designer to provide explicative text where redundant or frustrating events take place in order to soften the reaction of users.
The team already had a strong Design System, so I was able to being assembling the new workflow from existing pieces almost immediately. Hand wireframes were short-lived and used to obtain permission to build higher definition versions of the product.
The Handoff
Due to the size of the AFI organization, development was shared among multiple teams that would work on one feature or page at a time, using Figma’s native functionality to pass specifications to the developers. Each release was predated by a round of UAT, during which the consistency of the design with the live version was ensured.
The Results
The 2023 J.D. Power & associates report showed tremendous improvement versus the 2021, now ranking American Family’s online insurance shopping at the top of the industry. User numbers bear that out as well, with the year’s net new customers (a key KPI) nearly 25% above expectations.