Insurance Platform Research Case study

Discovering the needs of Insurance users to ideate on a better workspace.


Our Opportunity: De-risk platform development by uncovering the content that’s most valuable to our users.

ROLE: UX Research

TOOLS: Miro, PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams (for user and SME inquiries)

TIMELINE: 4 weeks

Background

Rethinking How Insurance Content is Provided

An Insurance company in the mist or reimagining how it provides information to insurance professionals with the goal of fundamentally changing how information is authored, provided, and consumed by users to keep pace with a quickly evolving insure-tech industry.

There are many workstreams contributing to this goal, one of which is centered around platform development for users of the company’s products. Internal stakeholders believe this to be a first step in a larger strategic plan.

A team was developed to do some generative research on the hypothesis to test its validity, and—if valid—uncover the content that’s most valuable to our users.

Secondary Data sources

Starting with Desk Research

Review of Past User Research

UX teams conducted user inquiries around product usage and needs. Product testing provided information about specific content types, pain points with usage/information.

Past Analytics and Surveys

Quantitative data from surveys provided insights on what users needed most and what could be added or removed to improve productivity. Specific product usage by user type was gathered.

Customer Success Data

Documents from the customer success team’s interactions and were available. Worth noting, in this B2B space, our customers are rarely our users. Regardless, this data still provided insights.

User Details

Defining a User Type

This company provides a lot of content serving a variety of user types. Quantitative data shows Product Developers/Analysts have touchpoints with the widest variety of content, so user inquiries were targeted to them.


Role: Product Developer/Analyst.

Job to be Done: Scheduled maintenance and analysis of the health and profitability of a line of business.

Use Case: Gather information — including internal performance data, regulatory information, competitor information, and possible product enhancement information, to perform a regularly scheduled maintenance check of my Product.

Problem Statement

Research Goals Emerged With Our Problem Statement

Content is decentralized and siloed. This makes it difficult and time consuming for Product Analysts to gather related, contextual, information–by topic, Line of Business or other criteria–so they can gauge the health and profitability of a product line. This experience wastes time, causes frustration for users, and erodes their perception of their value.

Discovery Goals

What Must Be Learned, Understood, or Decided


Understand what content and tools are most helpful when in the 'Gather' phase of a Product review, how content is filtered and categorized within a product (Line of Business), and the pain points in the process.

Key Research Questions:


What content is necessary for analysis (inside and outside the company)?


How they group/organize company products and the content in them?


How they access different content types provided by the company?


What are the pain points during the process?

Methods and approach:

Remote SME Interviews

2 company SMEs with backgrounds in product development

Remote User Inquiries

We talked with 7 users working for carriers from small to large

Quantitative User Data

Analytics reports showing website interactions and content type used


Miro boards were created for each user, housing responses to questions, insights, quotes, and other noteworthy data coming from interviews

Research Results

Three Major Themes Emerged


Using affinity mapping, themes became apparent among interviewees: Information types, the frustrations finding needed content, and thoughts on the current ‘homepage.' There were insights on the general sentiment about the company as well.

Theme 1: Information types


Core Content is Most Valuable.

Information and data specific to the task at hand is most important:

  • Most referenced were: notifications, forms, form language, and rules
  • Approved filings information is most useful to participants
  • Background and contextual information is needed by all participants.

Timely Alerts About Changes

Circulars are vital in keeping users informed of changes in product status.

  • Email alerts were used to stay current and provided timely information on specific changes affecting their product.
  • All participants expressed anxiety around missing important information updates about their product.

Non-filed Content is Secondary

Filing-related information adds value but isn’t necessary for this Job to be Done.

  • Emerging hazard info is a nice-to-have rather than necessary.
  • Platform education is appreciated but not needed for this Job to be Done
  • Tutorial videos/information are helpful for training but also not needed for this JTBD.

“Show me what’s happening...it’s extremely valuable to have up to date information. I don’t know how anyone could survive without that.”

— Research Participant

Theme 2: Frustrations With Finding Content



Interactions Within Products


“I could do with less clicks. There are too many clicks involved.”

— Research Participant

The predominant frustration was the number of clicks it takes to find the content needed.

  • Click trail of content so deep the user got lost in the product and had to quit out and start over to re-orient themselves.
  • Excessive number of clicks caused the product to shut down and stop working.
  • Participants mentioned printing the digital content as a workaround resulting in content that isn’t up-to-date.

Information Finding in Products


Some content is in a format that isn’t searchable. Content is overwhelming

  • Products Required a download to be searched taking them away from the task
  • Unnecessary downloading results in unwanted file buildup on local systems.
  • Content heavy pieces are hard to search/find due to size and format

“Searching... it’s very hard to scroll through, it’s such an aggravation. It makes searching so, so hard.”

— Research Participant


The ‘Why’ Behind Changes


“I have to solve a puzzle every time I’m trying to pick the right Form. If they just did the sorting correctly it would make things so easy.”

— Research Participant

Finding related content is time consuming

  • Frustration with repeated searches for related filings — each state has a different number, but had the same change in content.
  • Users wanted related information provided in context. ex: Alert a change in status, the reason for the change, the filing, relevant states, affected policy, and loss costs associated, if any.

Confusing Timelines


Understanding the source of a change and the timeline of that change is hard to follow

  • Users are confused & frustrated by edition date in the sort
  • There is a need for presenting information in a linear, timeline fashion
  • The company lacks empathy for the time it takes to implement new filings and rates

“If you want to see the change over time you have to pick each edition out of a mess of years. This makes it easy to make an error in my work.”

— Research Participant

Theme 3: Homepage/Logged-in page


The Logged-in Company Homepage was Generally Unappreciated

Relevancy and curation of content played a big part


Participants were entering to do a job, not browse content


Outdated content rarely changed or gave the appearance of not changing due to design


Content wasn’t relevant to them, so they didn’t engage with it

“If I see the same pictures over and over, I think nothing’s changed, so I don’t look at it.”

— Research Participant

Our Change Statement

We want to remove the silos around our content and provide context around policy changes while removing unnecessary content so that we can aid understanding of policy changes and reduce the number of clicks needed to find and download information.

How Might We Questions for Ideation

Centralize


How might we provide a centralized location for policy information and filing-related policy content?

Contextualize


How might we provide context around a change, so the full impact of the change is understood?

Alert


How might we alert users about changes in policy for their line of business outside of email?

Add Value


How might we drive users to the platform outside of content change/update alerts?

Putting Forward Solution Ideas
5 second summary:

Provide users policy change information and contextual content around changes

User needs:

“I need easily find all filing-related information affecting my Line of Business, including the background and reasoning for changes.”

Desired outcomes:

Improved findability of filed content, fewer clicks to find content, and increased engagement

Dependencies:

Personalization capabilities, content atomization, content tagging for searchability

What it involves:

A personalized platform or workspace to house content, products, and related policy information

Key risks / challenges:

Content authoring and formatting, unintuitive, siloed, and old product design. Legacy tech stack.

Metrics:

Fewer clicks between and within products, higher engagement with platform/workspace

Closing Thought

“There’s definitely competition out there that they need to somehow surpass them if they want to keep their products”

– Company product user