A responsive e-commerce website and updated branding for a fictional insurance company
Kaus is an established insurance company that sells an array of policies offline. With the rise of personal devices Kaus has been losing ground and wants to tap into a younger audience with a digital offering. Kaus want fresh, updated branding and a responsive website that is easy-to-use and appeals to a wider customer base.
My goal is to create a user-friendly, approachable website that is modern, trustworthy and appeals to younger audiences. My intial focus will be designing the process a user goes through to get an online quote.
UX Research, UX/UI design, User Testing
Figma, OptimalSort
4 Weeks
I understood what Kaus wanted to achieve through the brief, but my knowledge of the customer base and the insurance industry was lacking. Before starting on my research phase I knew there were four key areas I wanted to focus on.
I started by conducting research of the insurance industry. Without having the opportunity to speak to a subject-matter expert my research was mostly internet based, but having previously worked with insurance clients I had a good base of sources to draw from.
The market analysis helped me to understand the target users I needed to interview for the next stage of the research. Considering the time limit and constraints of this project I interviewed 4 participants, aged 28-57, three of which represented my target user, the fourth being a pre-existing insurance user.
There were some interesting key themes running through the answers given. I pulled out the main ones I wanted to address in my design.
My earlier research and interviews allowed me to create James, the user that would help focus my design. With this persona in mind, I continued to ensure I was designing for the group of users that James represented.
Information architecture was a key step in my design process. Knowing what James needed, I had to design an easily navigable and clean website, that allowed users to find information and helped demystify the complicated nature of insurance. I made a list of common pages found on competitor websites and, with the help of partcipants, I conducted a card sorting exercise. Participants grouped these pages into different categories, and I noted any pages that users struggled to find a place for.
The next step was understanding how a user would be interacting with the website. Based off my research I knew that the task most commonly completed was getting an insurance quote, so this was the area I wanted to focus my initial prototype on. To help map out the parts of the website a user would use I first mapped out a task flow, before expanding this to a more detailed user flow.
After putting together a few hand drawn sketches, I went straight into realising the structure of my design through wireframing in Figma. I started by wireframing key pages from the user flow. I had to ensure the design was responsive, so I created a design for both desktop and mobile.
Kaus wanted their branding to be fresh, modern, approachable and clean. I created a mood board of brands both within the insurance industry, and brands that my user James would typically use to come up with Kaus’ style. Logos really varied across competitor websites, so I decided to keep things simple by choosing a lowercase sans serif word mark.
I moved on to design the UI, which involved multiple mockups of select of various pages. Once I was happy with the design, I created a UI kit with my design patterns to help with final and future iterations of the website.
Using the wireframes, I brought together the different elements to create the visual design of the key website pages before creating a prototype ready for testing.
Participants were asked to complete to complete the task of getting a life insurance quote. I took notes as I observed, as well as asking questions to understand their decision-making process.
Participants were positive about the branding, saying the website was clean, approachable and easy-to-use. Users did not struggle to get a quote, with all participants completing the given task. Analysing the feedback I isolated the priority revisions below:
This was the first project I worked on that took me through the entire design thinking process from research to prototype, and I learnt a lot from the experience. Not only did it help expand my UX/UI skills, but it really pushed me think about how to achieve a client's goals.
With more time I would have liked to have spent more time on the research phase. Insurance is a highly technical area that requires subject matter expertise, and with this expertise I could have improved my user research phase to help design a better end product which navigates through an unapproachable insurance process.
