Aviva UK Life & Health Insurance, Research, Strategy and Design
"Improve the user experience for the .co.uk Life Insurance homepage and look at a new strategy for Life & Health insurance as a combinbed product."
Project planning/ brief
I took on the learnings I had gained from doing the Guerilla testing on the Home product pages and decided on the approach I wanted to take with the Life pages.
I was fortunate to have a very experienced Product Owner who had in depth knowledge about how Life customers behaved, and what their expectations were. We created a plan for how we wanted to approach the product and decided that we wanted it to be very disruptive to the exisitng design.
I started by doing some desk research into customers and the existing site, and I created a site map.
User testing the existing journey
Before working out the ideal journey for users, myself and the product owner spent 2 days testing the existing Life Insurance product to find out where the key pain points were and the problems users were experiencing.
Workshop with stakeholders in York
I then ran a design workshop with the Life Insurance product stakeholders in York. The stakeholders were from different parts of the business, e.g call centres, propositions, marketing.
This gave us a chance to feedback the user testing to the stakeholders. I created 8 videos of users going through the Life product, highlighting the problems users were experiencing.
I then ran design thinking excercises to problem solve some of the key pain points. This meant the stakeholders came up with several ideas to solve problems, and had buy in into the solutions. We also used this workshop to get good insight about the product from all of the key stakeholders.
Product redesign, wireframing & prototyping
I then spent some time taking on board the key problems, and worked out the best way to solve this. I ran design work shops with the product owner, customer experience manager and content team to come up with the best experience possible for the redesign.
We had some contraints to work towards in that the Life product is set up in a certain way - with many different sub life products, which is confusing for users. We found that users just see it as one product, with different layers of protection. Despite this we worked on the best solution we could. This included creating calculators and step by step interactive guides to help users understand Life Insurance.
User testing new product
Once I had put the prototype together for the ideal user journey we were ready to test it on users.
The feedback we had on the new improvements to the product and the overall design was generally received incredibly well. Users said they felt a lot more confident buying life insurance after going through my design.
Creating the MVP version for Adobe Experience Manager
After we had completed the second round of user testing, we compiled a report highlighting all of the elements that helped users and made them feel more confident in buying Life Insurance.
However, a lot of the elements I had created in my design were not possible for the first release, due to timescales. So the things that could not be added were taken on board and planned for a future release.
Working with Visual Designer on the final designs
I then handed my designs over to a visual designer who applied the brand elements, and ensured the sections in my designs fitted within the ‘Aviva Framework’ library of UI elements.
Life Insurance is a complex product, so I worked with the Visual Designer to create diagrams that helped illustrate the complexity of the options to users. How the product would work for users over time was the biggest pain point that I discovered in my user research.
User testing the existing Health product
The health product was also due to be re-designed and as I had worked with the product owner on Life, he requested that I also interview health customers to test the exisiting product.
We discovered a number of insights which I then talked through with a junior designer and mentored her in taking charge of the product and guided her through the re-design.
Mapping out the existing Life & Health UX, and a suggested new experience
After the research I had done on Life Insurance there were a number of insights I had discovered about the way people approach it and the journey they go on buying Life Insurance for the first time.
I drew out the existing journey that users go on when approaching Life Insurance and what they are feeling, thinking and doing when arriving at the Aviva Life Insurance product.
I then also drew out the ideal journey for users, ideas for how we could improve the journey for them based on what we had learnt.
I also included some more off the wall ideas.
Strategy for a new approach
Using insight from the propositions team, who were working on a project to combine Aviva Life & Health Insurance, I created a strategy document for the project. This explained the story of the users journey into our Life & Health products and what we need to do to redesign the experience around their needs.
Calculator concept
The strategy that I put together to create a new experience for Life and Health customers led me to the concept of a calculator.
When users arrived at the site they clicked on ‘Get a quote’ rather than scrolling down the page. This meant that they missed vital information about Aviva Life Insurance and Life Insurance in general. What we found was that users wanted to be educated about Life Insurance, but they ended up going through the quote journey, and this did not educate them.
The idea of having a calculator journey, rather than just providing a quote was to help users learn what they wanted to protect, and how much protection they might need.
Prototypes
I created two prototype journeys to test the best way of constructing the calculator journey.
The core difference between them was:
- The first one was based on pre-set information/data that we held about existing customers. Users started the journey in the My Aviva logged in state. They went through a journey that started with a standard price, based on a bit of criteria/information we already held about them, and the standard uk average income. This meant that the user then needed to change the values to see how it changed the price for them.
- The second prototype was a step by step journey for users that weren’t Aviva customers. It took users through a journey where they add on the different cover options and the price builds up as they go along. This was meant to help users understand what they are adding to the policy and what they want protection for.
Both journeys were aimed at helping users work out what they want to protect and choosing options based around their selections.
