About the product
An authenticated experience for business and personal insurance customers to manage their insurance coverage, bills, payments, claims etc. With over a year in the market, this is a conglomerate of apps enabled by different lines of business. The initial version started with serving the small-medium business customers. When I got involved, it was being expanded to middle and large market segments. This required integrating more insurance products, also scaling up in number of policies, bills and other entities managed in the product.
Key features like billing were initially enabled by integrating a legacy app. Around 30% of our customers were direct-billed. Who could potentially pay their bills through this app. Thus the goal was to enhance the user experience, make it responsive eventually increasing the bill pay usage.
My role
As a UX lead, I was brought in to design the experience for billing. Working with a Product Manager, Researcher and a UX designer, I brought the following practices in the team:
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Collaborative sketching
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Design sprints
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UX design for SAFe agile
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UX research informing the product road map
Features designed
Patterns designed
Revamp of UX engagement
When I got involved, the team was on-boarding to SAFe Agile. The challenge was to align the UX engagement and processes with rest of the train. The team had inertia of doing UX in silo and waterfall mode. Disconnected from entire team, it took additional time to iterate wireframes. UX research was done as validation of the created designs.
Problems
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UX work in silos with review and hand-off process
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No shared understanding of the problem, solutions and limitations
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UX under pressure to deliver before the beginning of iteration
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No UX research to inform the design process, product backlog
Changes we made
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UX lead started working with product strategy team (program level) to create the product road map.
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Plan UX research to identify potential user needs and validate the value of planned product features.
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Collaborative sketching sessions with business, architects, product owners, development leads on the team. This facilitated shared understanding of problem, UX thought process, and limitations that the team had to work with.
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Enhanced the visibility of the ongoing and planned UX research and roadmap work.
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Regular cadence for UX collaboration, also extended it to UX teams from other lines of business that contributed to this product.
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Assigned a specific day to release wireframes, this was in alignment with sprint schedule. This helped planning well reviewed UX deliverables, also set an expectation within the teams.
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Adopted Sketch and Invision, this gave us several advantages: reduced efforts in making prototype interactive, started relying on a style guide and pattern library.
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Invision helped in sharing the prototypes and ask for comments and feedback from wider audience.
Team collaboration
More quantitative research and surveys with:
Simple prototypes and collaborative reviews with:
