Designing a better claims experience, providing people with the ability to submit, track and manage their claims 24/7
When a leading British insurance company began modernising their traditional claims process to create a digital centralized claims hub, they needed company-wide buy-in to secure significant budget and resources to undertake the project.
As the design lead in an external, cross-functional team—including business strategists and a four-member engineering team—I contributed to part of this three-year transformation strategy. Our combined mission was to revolutionize the end-to-end motor claims process, enabling customers to submit, track, and manage their claims online, thereby reducing operational costs and improving internal efficiency. My primary responsibility was to shape the design vision and establish guiding experience principles that ensured the user journey was clear, intuitive, and provided calm reassurance at every step. This was essential in positively influencing internal C-level stakeholders.
This work served as a strategic roadmap and comprehensive handover, offering clear guidance for the company's future direction. It empowered senior stakeholders to assess the project's feasibility (tech stack infrastructure) and business impact (higher engagement) for the project. Below are the designs showcasing the primary screens of the user experience using a placeholder visual language.
Outcomes
• 50% of customers who can claim online, now do it online
• 28% reduction of claims being manually re-keyed by claims handlers, maximizing labour costs
• The company since has secured internal buy-in and grown this design further using the principles, templates and guidance provided
What I did
• Prototyped key interactions and experiences high level MVP and further user testing
• Helped prioritize user driven feature sets for release 1 & 2, based on companies technological capabilities
• Conducted stakeholder workshops, customer interviews, competitor research, and customer journey mapping
• Created documentation and assets to guide design vision, backend tech stack development, and service recommendations
• Build out the blueprint and high level MVP user experience that underpinned the internal Business Case for the Claims Modernisation Programme
To first validate the idea of a simplifying the motor claims process, a range of customer surveys and interviews were undertaken to better understand this problem space. Below demonstrate key pain points and learnings from the findings. These insights were then used to establish our strategic direction and 'must-have' focus for the new digital claim's hub (1st and 2nd launches).
With the challenge "How can we simplify the motor claims process experience to better enable end customers and call handlers", we entered into a co-creation process with the client's insurance team to define the product strategy and vision. We also created a CX Blueprint map where we ideated solutions across the entire customer experience.
To simplify complexity, we determined to first focus on the simplest car accident scenario group; the group of customers typically at fault, with no other passengers and no other drivers involved, ultimately being the primary person responsible for the car incident. In discussions, I led the wider group through mapping the customer journey to help them better understand how user needs shift, as customers are first triggered in an incident, report an incident, then manage the incident claim, and to align to the overall flow of the experience.
Constant alignment and shared perspectives & updates to the business, across design, tech and business teams
Before progressing into wireframes and high fidelity designs, I prioritized early stakeholder alignment through creating user flows based on our scenario. This was during the same period of mapping out the primary customer journey, with cross-functional teams. I directed the creations and edits of process maps and flow diagrams, which helped the entire team to understand all the steps in the process and what user information needed to be collected when and where.
This holistic approach ensured we gained alignment to a simplified customer experience, and provided us with a clear direction as we moved through the design process in alignment with engineering.
Building on the customer insights (Interviews & Surveys) and internal stakeholder interviews, we evolved the product features to deliver a tangible human-centered experience. From the beginning of the onboarding process, we wanted the people to feel as if they were having a conversation with the tech hub and telling it their incident story by answering simple and engaging questions or instructions that made them feel at ease and in control while registering their claim.
Wireframes were created to finalize the flow and process based on a new structuring and re-grouping of questions. As one of the client's first large complex projects, I guided them through the process of first creating black and white wireframes, we then created a placeholder look and feel to achieve a separate design for the client that could be used purely for their internal buy-in.
After finalizing the user flow, tech stack implications and process as a larger team, I then created high fidelity design prototypes communicating the vision, empowering internal- buy-in.
*Full prototype available on request
The project deliverable involved a condense handover document capturing engineering and coding suggestions, design prototypes, design experience principles, stakeholder interviews, market research and more.
Excerpt of Experience Design Principles to client, from final hand over documentation
