Renters Insurance Sign Up Made Easy
October 2018 - December 2018
Faced with a crop of new competitors with modern, slick websites, the client was seeing new sign ups for their renters insurance steadily decline. Redesigning and optimizing their sign up/onboarding flow was the most important piece of work to reverse their downward trend and level up against new competitors in a rapidly changing playing field.
Key Final Screens & States
Their Current State
Heuristics Review
To level set with the client team and begin the creative dialogue, I oversaw a coworker’s heuristics review of their current homepage and onboarding flow. We used Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. The document we delivered provided a handful of examples of potential optimizations based on each usability principle.
Landscape Review
I conducted a landscape review to compare our client’s onboarding flow against their two main competitors. Interestingly, their two newest competitors, Lemonade and Jetty, sat on opposite ends of multiple spectrums in terms of their UX/UI—specifically, number of steps; speed of seeing a quote; brand expression; etc. I also analyzed onboarding flows outside of the renters insurance industry to see if there were other lessons to learn and best practices to apply.
Optimizations & Prioritization
Following the heuristics and landscape reviews, we began the project in earnest. Our first step was to document all of our optimization ideas in a spreadsheet. The second step was to hold a workshop with the client to prioritize the optimization ideas and ultimately decide what we’d design and build.
This phase of the project was where we hit a snag. Pushing even small updates to their code would be a high level of effort. In addition to buggy code, they were managing two separate codebases—one for mobile, one for desktop. Changes would require twice the engineering effort. With even with the most basic changes to their current codebase out of the question, the client faced the reality of their situation. They decided to scrap their current code and stand up an interim site based on our designs until a future strategic re-engagement.
Sketching & Wireframing
Creating the wireframes was a truly collaborative process. The client had already explored what a redesign could look like. So we reviewed their work and identified the patterns we thought were most successful. Together, our creative team—Jenny Ta, UX designer; Erica Randhawa, art director; and myself—sketched out and worked through the intricacies of the onboarding flow. We then reviewed our whiteboard sketches with the client’s creative team, explained our thinking and collected feedback. From there we formally presented wires to the wider client team and moved into visual design.
Visual Design
Visual design was a breeze. The client didn’t have a styleguide and was looking to us for advice on how to standardize their visual design system. The wires were so high fidelity that visual design was basically a skinning exercise. The shades of blue and typography could easily skew generic but the sharp eye of Erica, the art designer, elevated the UI to feel modern, sophisticated and one that engenders trust (vital for a financial services company).
How We Fared
At the start of the project, success would have been defined as a handful of minor optimizations to their existing experience addressing specific user pain points. Instead, by the end of the project, success was an entirely new website. We were able to overcome the main challenge on the project and help the client reach the necessary conclusion—old, patched code can only last so long before it becomes time to overhaul.
Challenges
Old, buggy and patched code that simply couldn’t handle updates without breaking
Finding the balance between updating their onboarding experience to provide tangible benefits to users while delivering a feature set and design that made sense as a temporary site
Simplifying renters insurance—making renters insurance, a particularly uninteresting product, easy for users to understand
Learnings
I finally truly understand insurance terms like premium and deductible and liability
As always, having developers in the room and involved in conversations early on saves immense time, effort and stress later
Having an icebreaker for workshops is key
Team Members & Roles
Project Lead - Myself
Art Director - Erica Randhawa
UX Design - Jenny Ta
Project Management - Ping Liao
Engagement Management - Rachel Gill
