Policy Conservation
CLIENT
Colonial Life
CATEGORIES
Information Architecture
UX Strategy
UI Design
Content Strategy
TEAM
Kat Ingalls
Lead UX Designer
Kyle Southerland
Frontend Developer
Allen Pugh
Backend Developer
Heather Allison
Product Owner
Tenille Simmons
Business Analyst
Stephonie Sturkie
Scrum Master
Robert Harrelson
Jithesh Ramachandran
Mainframe Developers
Jane Huo
Tester
TOOLKIT
UX / Strategy
Google Analytics, Google Docs, Noteability
UI / Visual
Sketch
Build / Prototype
Invision
Problem
Business Overview
Colonial Life is a supplementary insurance company whose primary business is through employers. One of the strengths of its insurance policies is its highly-personalized product options. However, the number of different product configurations and potential use cases makes translating their customer experience to a digital platform exceptionally complex.
Design Challenge
The amount of time employees stay with a company has decreased over the years. While Colonial Life’s tradition business was still performing well, the opportunity for conserving employees policies after leaving an employer is enormous. Many employees were not aware they could keep their policies after leaving an employer. And the existing experience of keeping coverage was not high-performing well.
Colonial Life needed a solution to:
Notify users (policy holders) to a change in their policy status
Increase conversion from employer-billed benefits to individual-billed benefits
Process
Research
Before designing a solution, it’s crucial to understand the situation. So we learn from what has already been tried, and don’t repeat the same mistakes. And so that we can make sure we’re solving the right problem. For instance, are users not receiving a notification? Or are they getting one and just ignoring it? It’s a seemingly subtle distinction, but it has a huge impact on the strategy we use and whether or not the project is actually solves the issue.
The existing experience mailed a letter to policy owners whose coverage was about to lapse, with the option to “Continue this Valuable Coverage”. The letter doesn’t explain why your policy was about to lapse, or why it might be considered ‘valuable.’ Our in-house specialists learned that people often thought this letter was junk mail or they misplaced it. While the policyholder website did have a form to make a payment, the link was only listed under ‘Billing,’ the site had no indicator of which policies were available to conserve, and policyholders were not being notified digitally at all.
While mail can be a great partner to digital experiences, the letter template being used was came across as impersonal, salesy, and dated. Not exactly inspiring trust – the association you’d like to have for an insurance provider.
Define
An exercise combining task analysis and requirements definition identified the specific steps needed for a user to complete the goal (i.e. keeping their coverage). While the overall flow of the existing experience was kept (Receive notification → Review Policies → Select Policies → Update Payment Method), I also recommended ability to “View Coverage Details” to address the problem of users not understanding what their policy covered.
We needed a clear definition of what would give a helpful policy overview.
Design
Test
Solution
Impact
The Updated Conservation Experience:
Clearly communicates value of keeping policies by including easy-to-understand descriptions of policies and a focus on what users really care about: family members covered (deemphisizing policy numbers)
Improves Colonial Life’s perceived professionalism with a cleaner and more consistent UI, simpler navigation, and easier to understand claim and policy tiles
Enables more frequent updates with less development costs as UI components are systematized
This project is currently in development, but will update here when project launches.
