Stage 1: Discover

In order to understand how to create a worthwhile experience, we first have to understand who our users are. In order to do so, I conducted primary and secondary research to understand the problem space.

After forming a research plan, I began with secondary research. This included market research to understand market trends, competitive analysis for benchmarking the state of the insurance field, and provisional personas to test my assumptions about targeted users.

Moving on to primary research, I conducted 1 on 1 user interviews to gain insight into who it is I am designing for. The goal of the interviews was to understand the users’ expectations, motivations, and frustrations with insurance. Once the data from the interviews was synthesized, a user persona was created to a add human connection to the design process.

Interview Findings:

• 5 adults (2 Male, 3 female, ages 23-35)

• Lack of Understanding- Insurance companies do not do a good enough job in empowering their users in understanding the details of their policies

• Lack of Clarity- Participants felt that insurance companies often lack transparency about their coverage

• All users stated that they felt insurance is complicated and that they lack understanding about insurance in general

• 4/5 participants stated that their busy schedules do not give them the time to adequately research and compare options

• All users have purchased insurance online before and stated that ease of use was one of their top deciding factors when choosing insurance

Stage 2: Define

At this point, after getting to know our users, I found it key to revisit Kaus’ business goals to see the potential overlap. This helped shape the ideation by outlining and identifying clear goals to keep in mind when designing.

Using the Project Goals diagram, I created a feature roadmap in order to prioritize features for the redesign. This gave us a better feel for what is absolutely necessary for a MVP and what features may come later.

To understand our users’ mental models, an open card sorting exercise was carried out. The resulting similarity matrix and dendrogram showed how our users group insurance categories. This laid the groundwork for the site map.

Stage 3: Ideate

Continuing the work on Information Architecture, I began by making a task flow for getting a quote. A user flow was created to create an understanding of all the ways a user can accomplish a certain task (taking into account major decisions, exit points, and error states).

In order to help keep the designs consistent and fluid, a style tile was created. This helped create the vision and direction for the visual design of the responsive website.

Brining over the ideas and layouts from initial sketches, I built low-fidelity wireframes in Figma. These wireframes helped me quickly look at different layouts, hierarchies, and functionalities before beginning the main design.

Using the wireframes and style tile for reference, I designed the new high-fidelity responsive UI designs for Kaus Insurance. I also designed a UI kit using elements from the responsive webpage to streamline the development of future Kaus pages.

Stage 4 & 5: Prototyping and Testing

With the completion of the responsive web design, I created a high-fidelity Figma prototype. Two tasks were created to test the usability of the site and a total of 5 participants were chosen.

The results from the usability tests were promising, as all participants were able to complete their tasks with little to no difficulty. However, some minor tweaks and suggestions were brought up (such as form labels and wording of certain insurance questions) and were fixed in the final iteration.