Designing a new digital end-to-end claims experience, giving customers the ability to submit, track, and manage their motor claims 24/7.
Making a motor insurance claim is one of the most stressful experiences a customer can have. You've just had an accident. You're shaken. And then you have to navigate a complex, largely offline process that requires multiple phone calls, repeated information, and no visibility of what happens next.
A leading British insurer knew this needed to change. The vision was clear. A centralised digital claims hub that customers could use any time, from anywhere. But this wasn't just a digitisation project. It was about building a business case strong enough to win C-suite backing, commit real budget, and prove that investing in design upfront would reduce cost-to-serve and drive adoption.
That's where I came in.
Outcomes/Business Impact
• 50% online adoption among eligible claimants since launch, cutting dependency on high-cost call centres
• 28% reduction in manual re-keying by claims handlers, directly lowering operational costs
• Design principles, prototypes, and templates adopted as a strategic roadmap, enabling stakeholders to secure internal buy-in, and commit budget to expand the digital claims programme
• The project became an organisation-wide proof point that design investment reduces cost-to-serve and improves customer loyalty, making the case for further design investment across the business
What I did
• Served as design lead within an external cross-functional team of strategists, product owners, researchers, and engineers
• Shaped the design vision, user experience principles, and customer experience blueprint that formed the backbone of the internal business case
• Conducted customer surveys and interviews to identify key pain points, confusion, lack of visibility, and anxiety were the primary blockers
• Led co-creation sessions with stakeholders to map the end-to-end claims process and identify where design could cut costs
• Creation of process maps, user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes
• Prioritised user-driven feature sets for strategic roadmap releases 1 and 2 based on the company's technological capabilities
• Presented experience principles and prototypes directly to C-level leaders, shifting the conversation from "technology feasibility" to "business impact enabled by design"
• Delivered a comprehensive handover document capturing engineering and coding suggestions, design prototypes, experience principles, stakeholder interviews, and market research
Visuals of design output underpinning the story.
Motor claims at this insurer were managed largely offline. Every incident requiring expensive call-handler intervention, complex follow-ups, and a process that felt inconsistent and stressful for customers at an already difficult moment.
Stakeholders knew change was needed. But they lacked a shared understanding of the customer journey, which made committing budget feel risky. Success here depended on proving not just usability, but measurable return on investment through efficiency gains. Design had to earn its place at the table.
To validate the opportunity and establish direction, we began with in-depth discovery, combining customer interviews, call-centre insights, and process-mapping sessions with claims handlers to understand the problem from every angle.
What emerged was consistent: customers felt confused, invisible, and out of control throughout the claims process. They had no way to track progress, no clarity on what came next, and no confidence that their claim was being handled. These insights became the foundation for our strategic direction and the must-have priorities for the digital claims hub across both launch phases.
With a clear challenge, "How can we simplify the motor claims experience to better serve both customers and claims handlers?", we entered a co-creation process with the client's insurance team to define product strategy and vision together.
We created a full CX Blueprint map, ideating solutions across the entire customer journey and identifying where simplification could simultaneously improve experience and reduce operational cost.
One key strategic decision shaped everything that followed: rather than trying to solve every claims scenario at once, we focused first on the simplest case: customers at fault, no other passengers, no other drivers involved. The group with the clearest, most contained journey. This gave us a clean test case to prove the model before expanding scope.
I led the wider team through mapping how customer needs shift across the three phases of a claim, from being triggered by an incident, reporting it, and then managing it through to resolution. That shared understanding became the alignment foundation for every design decision that followed.
Constant alignment and shared perspectives & updates to the business, across design, tech and business teams
Before a single wireframe was drawn, I prioritised stakeholder alignment. I directed the creation and iteration of process maps and user flow diagrams that helped the entire cross-functional team, design, product, engineering, and client, understand every step in the process and what information needed to be collected, when, and where.
This wasn't just good process. For a client embarking on one of their first large, complex digital projects, it was essential. Getting alignment on the experience before anyone touched pixels meant we moved through design and engineering with far less friction and rework.
The experience we designed was built around a single principle: a motor claim should feel like telling your story, not filling in a form.
From the first screen, we wanted customers to feel as though they were having a conversation through answering simple, engaging questions that guided them through their incident naturally, making them feel at ease and in control at a moment, when they were anything but.
We moved through black and white wireframes first, guiding the client through that process deliberately, building shared understanding of the flow before any visual design decisions were made.
A placeholder look and feel was then developed specifically for internal buy-in purposes. Only once the flow, tech stack implications, and process were finalised across the full team did I move into high-fidelity prototypes communicating the vision, in a way that could land with C-suite stakeholders and secure the investment needed to build it.
*Full prototype available on request
The final project deliverable was a comprehensive handover document capturing the full picture: engineering and coding suggestions, design prototypes, experience principles, stakeholder research, and market analysis, everything the client needed to continue confidently without us.
Excerpt of Experience Design Principles to client, from final hand over documentation
This project demonstrated something I now believe firmly: human-centred design directly delivers business ROI. Not as a soft benefit, but as a measurable reduction in operational costs, an unlock for digital transformation budgets, and a shift in how senior leaders perceive design.
Coming in as an external lead, I had no formal authority. Everything depended on building trust quickly, creating shared understanding across a complex stakeholder landscape, and keeping the focus on the customer when commercial pressures pulled in other directions.
It also reinforced that service design is an organisational alignment tool as much as a customer experience practice. The CX blueprint wasn't just a design artefact, it was the thing that got a room full of people who had never agreed on the customer journey to finally agree. That's the work that made everything else possible.
