Brian Caoyonan
Experience design leader, mentor and problem-solver.
Farms under 80 hectares generating less than AUD $50,000 annual turnover are classed as Hobby Farms. These types of farm owners, wanting to insure their business, had to look at traditional farm insurance, usually much too complex for their specific needs. At the same time, IAG was in the process of migrating a legacy platform to a new development stack. This opened up the need to design a new way to purchase insurance which would be validated with a pilot product.
I'M AN ORIGINAL CATCHPHRASE
Solution
A digital product for "Hobby Farmers" to make navigating the complex world of business insurance meaningful and effective. Farm owners had limited time to visit or speak with an insurance agent and this new product would allow farm owners to self-assess their needs using their own devices.
Result
An 8% increase in Hobby Farm conversions stemming from a decrease in drop-off rates due to the ability for users to:
- build a customised policy by combining individual insurance covers
-
include their home as well as farm operations on one policy
Role
Lead UX
Process
1. Investigate
2. Ideate
3. Implement
4. Improve
Research
With sparse information about Hobby Farmers, analytics, and usability testing painted the initial picture but to understand what these type of farmers really need, I first set up interviews and workshops with insurance brokers to understand their interactions with Hobby Farmers and followed up with the farmers themselves.
Interesting insights emerged, which underpinned the need for these types of customers to be understood. Farmers felt the only way their needs can be met is to find the solutions themselves, with a little bit of guidance along the way. As such, farmers wanted to get a picture of how much it would cost to protect their entire operation, and then selectively remove items to reach the desired price.
Supplementing analytics with qualitative interviews, I discovered a large number of potential customers were being forced to competitor because of being shut-out of the quote process due to an error that otherwise might not disqualify them from approval.
We decided to tackle this two-fold. First, by doing more to educate the people in the first place so that more people go through the quote process and second, by providing clear error messages that would allow users to go back and correct mistakes.
Planning
Synthesis
With a wealth of data, we needed to include cross-functional teams in synthesis and analysis.
Combining the information from internal subject matter experts and the merging insights from user research, I translated the outputs of my research into design tools. Customer Journey Maps were used to plot pain points along the customer journey, along with proto-personas and user flows to keep the user at the centre of design.
Planning
Delivery
Working with an Agile delivery team, I championed the user, taking part in team rituals - stand-ups, sprint planning, elaboration and grooming sessions - ensuring the outputs of Investigation and Ideation were carried through to delivery.
Design tools and artifacts were used to facilitate these meetings and feedback was positive all around in terms of keeping the user at the forefront
Concepting
Challenging the traditional way the organisation thought about insurance, we took a step back and reimagined the experience for small to medium size business owners.
User Flows
With user empathy fat the forefront, we redesigned the user flow. Including cross-functional teams in every step was fundamental in understanding what limitations we were working with but also in identifying who had the power to make changes.
Prototyping
Together with a visual designer, we I turned concepts into prototypes and planned new design patterns to inform the next version of our Design System
Delivery
An 8% increase in Hobby Farm conversions stemming from a decrease in drop-off rates due to the ability for users to:
- build a customised policy by combining individual insurance covers
-
include their home as well as farm operations on one policy
Usability Testing
Usability benchmarking was conducted post-launch to benchmark the experience. Outputs from this testing were fed back into a usability backlog and prioritised for execution.