KAUS
An insurance company looking to stay fetch.
BACKGROUND
KAUS is an established insurance brand that has been offering its insurance packages through agents regionally. With the boom in direct to consumer, they are looking to expand and transform their brand into a more modern and clean look. We were asked to redesign their logo and website to attract a younger audience while keeping all of their offerings intact.
MY ROLE
Lead designer through end-to-end process: discovery, user research, requirements, logo design, wireframing, prototyping, and testing.
TEAM
A personal project.
PROBLEM
KAUS has built a company that strays from fully customizable policies and instead sells fully prepared packages — this allows them to have better rates than their competitors but also limits the flexibility many users need in finding the perfect insurance policy.
Due to their already limiting policy options, their brick-and-mortar stores have been losing consumers to their online competitors.
The high-level goal of this project was to identify the pain points of choosing an insurance package and provide features and designs that could offer a solution to these frustrations. I synthesized the research into actionable insights that supported informed design decisions that were relevant, useful, and delightful to the user.
What are our primary goals?
Understanding the nature of present-day insurance policies and where they are currently deterring a younger audience?
What does our target audience already understand about insurance policies — what do they need to learn?
What is our target audience looking for in a policy?
Understand pain points in purchasing an insurance policy with other insurance websites.
How are users both interacting and searching for insurance policies?
Fresh brand — fresh website.
A successful launch would mean not only driving policy sales but allowing users to educate themselves and seamlessly browse hundreds of policy options. In addition, we had higher-level goals for the business: driving larger conversion rates and increasing revenue through online sales.
Diving into the research.
Market research.
The market research helped us better understand the market problems, opportunities, current trends and practices.
How users prefer to contact customer service across multiple pages.
Which devices users are primarily using to search for insurance.
General trends of insurance companies and their customers.
What current insurances are lacking In the digital space.
Competitive analysis.
Geico | Nationwide | Allstate | Progressive | State Farm
The competitive analysis shed light on other direct competitors in the insurance space and how they are speaking to a younger audience. We were able to analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and exhibit opportunities for improvement.
User interviews.
To get a better understanding of the pain points in purchasing insurance, I interviewed a mix of both insured and uninsured individuals — along with stakeholders in the industry.
I began by recruiting participants that fell under the target demographic to gain a better understanding of their pain points within the insurance industry now.
Here’s what we found.
01. Ages 25-35 tended to stray away from any insurance because of both pricing and lack of knowledge.
02. There is a lot of misinformation about pricing through word of mouth.
03. The previous generations have placed much value in having an insurance policy on both their home and themselves.
04. Most young urbanites living in a big city aren’t purchasing homes at a younger age anymore and strictly rent — thus not seeing the value in insurance.
05. Millennials would rather take their money and spend it on experiences such as dining or sightseeing rather than purchasing policies.
06. All the individuals who are insured did so through a referral. This seems to be consistent across generations.
07. Insured individuals did not have a preference as to using a website or an app, most just stuck with the web since it requiresd the least amount of work (I.e. downloading an app).
08. The process to acquire a policy feels tedious to many.
Thus,
Education and information are key.
All in all, it seems that our target demographic doesn’t place much value in staying informed on insurance policies.
Our Quick Solutions
01. Taking an informative approach on the website with options to both explore and compare policies.
02. Keeping the quote process quick and seamless while focusing on providing value in terms of pricing.
Empathizing with the user.
Once all the information from the research phase was processed, I was able to begin defining the product. I synthesized the information by creating Spotify's Social feature User Persona and Empathy Map in order to determine the feature's direction.
Olivia is a classic example of a present-day millennial. Her values are placed very differently than her parents were at the same age.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Understanding browsing activity.
Once there was a better understanding of who our user was, I began to analyze competitor websites to get a better sense of industry standards on website flows.
To explore possible categorization options of the updated KAUS website, a card sorting exercise was developed using OptimalSort.
IA serves as the skeleton of a design and facilitates the user’s understanding of the site’s functionality. Because KAUS offers dozens of insurance plans, I conducted an open-sort card sorting exercise to better understand how the user expects the site’s content to be structured and organized. The sorting exercise revealed 6 main categories: Home, Renters, Pet, Auto, Weather, and Travel insurance.
The grouping made it much easier to create a site map and begin thinking through a user flow.
Site Map
I organized the site’s information into a site map to solidify the high-level structure of the pages.
User and Task Flow
Following the task flow, I expanded the user journey into many miniature task flows. I was able to identify a handful of roadblocks and dead ends including quote abandonment, information confusion, and potential bounce rates.
Then, I moved onto a user flow specifically around registering for an insurance plan with KAUS. This deliverable challenged me to consider the flow with the least amount of friction to both discover a policy, learn about it, and ultimately sign up.
Exploring solutions through wireframes.
Initial Sketches.
Mid-Fi Mock-Ups
Design Decisions: Implementing the user research into a desktop-friendly homepage.
From the start, I began to look at how information can be presented so that the user feels invited in to click through and explore multiple policies — seamlessly.
Adding a carousel with top-grossing policies above the fold with an option to click in and learn further.
A quote is located directly below the information banner.
Since KAUS is primarily targeting a younger demographic with both the re-brand and the website launch — mobile and tablet browsing would be an important piece to the puzzle. I took a look at how to best scale the desktop into a cohesive and responsive design.
A quick break for some UI talk.
Creating a logo and color palette is an important piece to the rebranding for KAUS. Keeping in mind our target audience, I looked back at our persona - Olivia - to create a UI kit fit for success.
Mixing in a minimalistic logo with splashes of color.
What I got was a collection of colors all overlapping to create a rounded-out logo that signifies all of the colorful policies that KAUS has to offer.
Hi-Fi Mock-Ups
Design Decisions:
Implementing the UI kit into a desktop-friendly homepage. Using the colors to translate the transparency and speak to a younger demographic to influence them to learn more about insurance policies.
Users want answers and they want them now. Inserting both a FAQs option in the navigation bar as well as a chat feature will aid in receiving information quickly.
From our user interviews, we learned that most users not investing in insurance did not have enough information about it. Users want to feel transparency from the companies they invest in. When leading a user through the checkout flow, I wanted to make sure both pricing was as clear as possible and any add-ons were transparent.
Policy product pages staying relevant. From the homepage itself, users can click through to the coordinating policy page — here, users can scroll through and not only proceed on with a quote (or bundle) but learn more specifics.
Our usability testing checklist.
High-level
It is easily learnable and memorable?
Do participants have an easy time navigating throughout the website?
Test the user flow in fulfilling a task are minimal errors in completing a task.
Test whether the design aids in the CTA.
Usability test finding.
I wanted to document pain points, hesitations, confusion, and opportunity for improvement regarding content, hierarchy, flow, and UI.
Completion Rate: 100%
Every participant was able to educate themselves on an insurance policy, speak to an agent, and proceed through the quote checkout process.
Error-Free Rate
All participants were able to navigate through the homepage buttons to the renter’s insurance product page.
2 out of 3 participants opted to chat with an agent versus calling in.
All participants were able to navigate multiple contact options throughout the prototype.
2 out of 3 participants wanted to see a “Discounts” section from the product page.
All participants recognized the orange CTA buttons immediately.
Affinity Map
Successes
The brand logo and color scheme.
Chat an agent optionality.
Clear branding.
Errors
Button colors.
Checkout form fields.
White space in checkout.
Improvements
Shortening the form fields.
Improving the homepage look.
Adding a zooming feature to the maps on "Find My Agent."
Next steps.
Opportunities to continue iteration. Here’s where to take things.
01. Adding a feature to the Find an Agent map that allows for the user to zoom in and out.
02. Starting at… Include pricing copy within each product page summary that indicated how much a product may cost. This makes it easier for our target user to have a feel for policies at a high level to not discourage them.
03. Re-evaluate the buttons used on the homepage above the fold to ensure that the products listed are top performers and push sales.
04. Continue to work through the checkout to ensure the quickest quote and purchasing flows.
User-reflection.
With this project, I learned just how important it was to test, test, annnd iterate. Having finished the final product, I quickly realized that I could continue testing all of the different aspects of the website — starting with the homepage — and iterating on them with a consistent Scrum framework.