Medical Malpractice Insurance Quoting Portal
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Summary
My team was tasked with the digital transformation of a decidedly analog quoting process.
A process consisting of paper forms and phone calls with insurance agents was going fully online for users who wanted a digital experience. Not only that, the MVP was launching with two insurance products- the primary medical malpractice insurance as well as an add-on cyber and regulatory insurance, with a design that could scale for future products.
There were three primary problems we had to solve to create this product.
The Problem
Getting a quote for medical malpractice insurance is much more complex than a car insurance quote. My team was charged with building a fully online quote & application process that’s simple and straightforward for the user while playing nicely with complicated back-end systems, logic, and databases.
Given all this complexity, we had to ensure that the user knows where they are in the process at all times and what is required as clearly and directly as possible.
An innately complicated process
As complicated as the user’s process is, the back-end powering the experience is even more convoluted. One click of a button may call multiple databases, scan spreadsheets for rating logic or calculate a quote or rate change based on a variety of inputs. Not only did our designs need to be lean to ensure high performance with a tangled web of logic running in the background, but we also needed to ensure the user “felt” as little of that complexity as possible.
A complex web of back-end connections
First to market
No competitors have a fully online quote and application process, and by this point, you can probably guess why. We were tasked with creating a process that would allow users to both complete a full application in one sitting and end up with an insurance policy at the end or leave as needed and come back to their quote in the same place they left off.
What I Did
My team of two was responsible for the entire design. We worked together to understand and clarify requirements, collaborate with subject matter experts across teams and deliver a complete design within a tight timeline. We accomplished this by:
Participating in cross-functional discovery and requirements gathering
Working with developers to ensure we understood technical limitations
Translating feedback from underwriting, marketing and technology from their respective languages into design decisions
Continuously updating the design as we discovered more and as requirements changed
QA testing completed screens and providing feedback to developers
Process
We had to start by getting to know the platform our design would be built on. The company had contracted with a third-party logic engine that would both power the portal’s back-end and serve as the framework for the UI, so we kicked off the project by researching the software’s design system & capabilities.
Got familiar with the parameters
Researched quoting applications across industries
To get a feel for what was available in the industry and what users might expect when seeking a quote, we researched competitors in the medical malpractice industry as well as quoting processes in traditional consumer insurance industries such as car and home insurance.
The quoting portal is the first product in what will be a series of first-in-industry customer portals. In preparation, we defined a design system that we would be using across a cohesive customer experience, so this was our first design completely created in that system.
Implemented our new design system
Challenges
We had to finish the initial end-to-end designs quickly in late December so that development could start at the beginning of the year.
Timeline
Because this is slated to be the first product in a series of new builds for a cohesive customer portal built across multiple platforms, we had to look ahead and start figuring out how our designs would work alongside portals that hadn’t yet been designed.
Future considerations
Medical malpractice insurance isn’t exactly a traditional technology industry, so we’re defining the processes for product builds *as* we build. Not only were we trying to build this portal as effectively and efficiently as possible with incomplete processes, but we were simultaneously trying to learn from what was and wasn’t working in this build to apply to future processes.
Design Ops
Takeaways
As a small team, we’re responsible for a lot, but when we received the deadline for this project, we knew we had to get fully focused and treat it as a true sprint. It was rewarding to see what we could achieve in a short period of time when we were completely zeroed in.
When I saw how quickly we were capable of completing an end-to-end design, it made me wonder what else we could fit into short timelines. As a new UX department in a legacy industry, we don’t have strong processes for research and discovery yet and often the reasoning is that we just don’t have the time. With the right planning, this experience validated that we could make the time.