Prudential
Role — UX Design Lead
The Client: Prudential, Absence and Disability Claims
The Ask: To design and build a future state claims platform.
The Team: We experimented with a new way of working where we tackled invisible structures for the win. Ask me about it!
My role: Design lead for the project with 2 reports
5 UX/UI Designers
4 Dev engineers
2 UX Copywriters
1 Business Designer
2 Project managers
2 Account Managing Directors
Design agenda for this project
Project scoping
Product flows
Extensive user research
High-fidelity prototypes
User journey map
Filing a claim is not easy. It’s stressful, intimidating, and confusing. And customers demand ease. They demand convenience. They want to understand and feel understood, which seems impossible with something as complex as insurance.
But what if it was possible? What if Prudential made it possible?
We designed a state-of-the-art insurance experience.
“Dealing with insurance companies while you’re already in physical pain, it sucks, you know. This app looks clean and easy. It breaks down the necessary information. The simple graphics are welcoming. It makes me feel that my employer cares … its what they call empathy for workers.” - Dean (IT supervisor, living in Milwaukee, MI)
Snapshot of the sprint timeline
The Design and Dev teams began working together from the get-go. User Testing was done parallelly at the end of each sprint or when there were new components and content to be tested. All this helped to engage all players equally and to maintain one source of truth for the whole project.
Product flows
Insurance is surrounded by legal constraints and laws specific to each state. Working with business designers early on helped to identify the right information to show and collect from users depending on their location. Here are some examples.
User testing
My motto was to test often. With a “better safe than sorry” attitude, we did about 50 hours of intensive user testing sessions — 15 one-hour moderated user interviews every sprint. We learned quickly and revised the designs in a true iterative fashion.
I tested the flows for each claim type.
It’s only on this project that I discovered that we can file a claim to cover the time taken to attend jury duty. Our research revealed that most people use their personal time off.
I created an interactive and iterative research deck to capture the insights from our weekly user testing sessions.
The interactive deck helped the clients follow the work on a continual basis and circulate internally.
Business goal — To reduce claims-related call volumes and make filing claims a seamless digital process by providing an entirely self-service option to customers.
Keeping in mind the business goal, our testing focused on three major areas:
Usability: Is the task of ‘filing a claim’ intuitive and easy to complete without calling for help?
Clarity: Does the user comprehend the intent and the information provided
Desirability: Is the experience of filing a claim gratifying, engaging, and valuable to the user?
An excerpt from our iterative research synthesis
It all began with a robust user journey map
Imagine filing a claim for a birth, a death, an illness, an adoption, a military deployment, and more from the convenience of your phone. Or learning about all the benefits available to you — the federal, state, and employer policies you never knew existed. Imagine that filing a claim looks more like your favorite web app than the tedious process we know today.
Now let’s look at how we can imagine a future together and bring this to life.
Goals of Prudential Transformation
Take a modular approach to design and engineering, and control user access with role-based permissions.
Allow for seamless threaded communication across webchat, texting, email, and phone.
Make it easy to file a claim online and see the different payments that apply (Federal, State, Municipal, Company).
Allow employees and associates to use a lookup service for more accurate health care provider info.
Make it easy for health care providers to submit medical information online in a consistent and streamlined way.
Make it easy for employers to provide job-related information online, asking only the questions that are needed.
