Case Study: Flow Car Insurance

Flow Car Insurance

Background

Flow insurance is a leading insurance business who believes in providing a great user experience to their customers. When Flow started, there was a gap in the market for rolling, monthly insurance that could be fully controlled by customers online, 24/7. Flow is now offering car and home insurance products.

My Contribution

Goal
The goal was to create a seamless journey from starting the Flow’s web application and getting a quote, to logging into account space and carrying mid-term adjustments (MTA).
Flow’s high level objectives are:

• Make the journey fast, simple and easy to use for everyone
• Give users more control by having everything online 24/7

Role
Insurance most of the time is a complicated and confusing process for many users. My role was to design the end-to-end experience of getting a car insurance cover including the self-service account area. 

I led the design of the Flow journeys and worked alongside the whole product team, multiple product managers, researchers, copywriters, data analysts and development teams.

Problem definition
The first thing I did was an audit / expert review. It was important to do an UX audit of the existing designs and go through the discovery and all the research that was already done.

I found 3 key areas for improvements:

• Optimising content for ease of scanning and comprehension;
• Articulation of how pricing works;
• Improve the progress bar to help users to gauge the size of the task.

Observation
Because the product wasn’t launched yet when I joined Flow, I was curious to put the existing designs in front of users and gather some first hand insights which to feed into the next design decisions.
Because we wanted some quick insights into the Flow user journey this research was light touch in form of a Guerrilla user testing.
We were aware that the journey was not ready for thorough user testing because ongoing development issues meant the test environment site would break meaning the user could not proceed to the next steps. This meant user testing was split between the test site and a mock up prototype which wasn’t great and coud alter the findings.

Usability testing findings
Over half of the participants found the pricing structure confusing. Although most realised that the price would vary each month – users were unclear as to why it would go up and down. They also struggled to articulate the top and bottom ceiling of payment after the first month and why the price would vary. A common argument was that “if all my details stay the same I should pay the same amount each month”. If users don’t understand how the pricing structure works, they may not buy the product.

One of the participants in the test wanted to upload the back image of their driver licence before the front image causing the site to break. Other participants were reluctant to upload their documents and wanted alternatives to enter their driving licence details manually.

Customer journey map
In a workshop together with Flow stakeholders, I mapped out the customer journey. During this exercise we played back the full user testing findings to Flow stakeholders and used this opportunity to rework the journey and agree next steps. This process of going through the user journey forced conversations for a shared understanding mental model with the whole Flow team and was used later as a reference for decision making.

Ideation
Based on all the research findings I began to construct the user flow, build the wireframes and the prototypes. I mainly focused on fleshing out the Quote & Buy experience and self-service account area interactions.

UI design

Time and effort was spent on designing a fitting logo and design assets, such as icons and components. To show how the web app would behave on various devices, I made responsive designs for desktop and mobile.

Testing
A new prototype was created to test assumptions and uncover critical problems in the design. The main goals of testing were: ease of navigation, identify any bottlenecks, and observe the user paths for completing each task. The test was conducted with 5 participants within the target group (existing young drivers).

Test results insights:

• Change the default of the driving licence scan. Consider having the driving licence scan optional and let users to manual input the driving details;
• Rethink the articulation of how the price works and test different iterations of the pricing structure;
• Provide trust and transparency through the journey. Give users constant reinforcement by adding elements such as callouts for everything that change or influence the quote price.

Following UX revisions, the next steps in the project involve updating the prototype and conducting additional usability tests to verify these changes.

Next, more features would be designed and tested, such as the complete Quote and Buy journey and the self-service mid-term adjustments processes.