Insurance Application Platform
Building Cohesiveness & Maintaining High Adoption Rates
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
Duration
4 Months
Standing out from the crowd while building creating visual harmony
Background & Challenge
Our client, a life insurance company, provides a suite of tools for Financial Professionals to assist clients in purchasing their insurance products. They recognized they were a part of an industry that was seeing consolidation on third-party platforms. Our client recognized this as a major area of opportunity. They felt they could be a differentiator: to uniquely position themselves as owners of tools to create a unique, unified, best in class digital experience.
Having recently redesigned their life insurance quoting tool, the client was preparing for its launch but faced a new challenge—ensuring consistency with their life insurance application tool, which was still managed by a third party. Without alignment, there was a risk of a fragmented user experience. This redesign effort was not just about solving a specific usability issue but about modernizing the application tool to feel less dense, improving brand perception, and creating a cohesive experience by leveraging the same visual design patterns from the quoting tool.
My Role and Team
We began by uniting our stakeholders' vision
Purpose Statement
However, that last measure of success—“positive feedback”—was too vague to serve as a concrete benchmark. To ensure the redesign could be evaluated effectively, we worked with the client to establish clear, quantifiable success metrics. Together, we determined that success would be measured by:
Faster application completion times
Retention of the tool's industry-leading adoption rate
Increase in active users
Reduction in client support calls for assistance
Shortcomings were exposed by two forms of analysis
Annotated Users Flows
At the outset of the project, we encountered our first challenge: we had no direct access to the tool itself.
To work around this, I conducted a thorough analysis of video demos, capturing key interactions through annotated screenshots and mapping out simplified user flows. These initial flows provided a structured way to identify pain points and usability gaps, forming the foundation for deeper exploration.
Even in this early analysis, several issues became immediately apparent—some affecting efficiency, others creating unnecessary friction in the user experience. A few key examples included:
Inability to identify required fields
Fields often lacked a visual signifier to alert users of what was necessary to complete on the page
Lacking Visual Heirarchy
Text and buttons often lacked styling that contributed to readability and understand primary actions on a page
Error Identification
Even when a user did not interact with components, error styling was used, potentially in lieu of denoting required items
Confusing Navigation
Navigation elements sometimes disappeared, while other times shows two items being active at the same time
Heuristic Evaluation
Once we gained access to the tool, I led a scoped down heuristic analysis to evaluate its usability through multiple lenses. Given the tool’s text-heavy interface, I took a holistic approach, advocating for 4 heuristics that integrated visual design, UX principles, and content strategy.
This broader perspective allowed us to assess the experience from multiple angles, ensuring no pain point went unnoticed. Rather than just assessing surface-level interactions, I focused on key principles that would shape a more intuitive experience:
• User Control & Freedom – Ensuring users could easily navigate, undo actions, and recover from mistakes
• Consistency & Standards – Aligning UI patterns with industry best practices
• Match Between System & Real-World Expectations – Creating an experience that mirrored how financial professionals actually think and work
• Error Recognition & Recovery – Identifying areas where the system could provide clearer guidance and prevent user frustration
The analysis revealed both strengths to retain and critical areas for improvement, creating a baseline for our design decisions. These findings would serve as a key reference as we layered in insights from user research, ensuring every change was both strategic and impactful.
We gathered insights with constrained research
Stakeholder Interviews
Early in our discovery process, we ran into our second unexpected challenge—we couldn’t speak directly with Financial Professionals to understand their experiences firsthand. Instead, we turned to our stakeholders, leveraging their insights from past conversations with users. While this limitation initially seemed like a setback, it led to invaluable insights about how these professionals actually worked.
One of the most striking revelations was that Financial Professionals weren’t completing applications in a strict step-by-step sequence. Unlike the linear workflows we had designed for in previous projects, these users approached applications dynamically, tackling sections in the order that made the most sense to them. They weren’t looking for a rigid path forward—they wanted the freedom to move between sections seamlessly, prioritizing tasks as needed.
"Sequential order doesn't really matter… what you need to do needs to be front and center"
The navigation itself needed to tell a story—what had been completed, what remained, and what required immediate attention. By designing for flexibility and clarity, we empowered Financial Professionals to work at their own pace while ensuring they always had the information they needed to move forward confidently.
I developed a new concept that empowered Financial Professionals with flexibility
User Experience Concept Development
While analyzing user flows for key application types, I identified opportunities to streamline the number of navigational elements and reduce unnecessary steps, enhancing efficiency. A unique, jarring experience that felt out of line from what we heard about the ways Financial Professionals work was the lack of context when reopening in-progress applications. Users were dropped back where they left off, but was that always the right place to start?
To address this, I designed a "landing page" experience, providing a clear snapshot of completed and outstanding sections. This created a uniform experience for those retuning back to an application, or someone starting a new application. From there, the Financial professional could forge their own path using a tabbed secondary navigation, giving them the freedom to navigate as they pleased while staying informed on progress.
I brought this concept to life through diagrams and wireframes, presenting both the flexible experience and more sequential experience with pros and cons for both approaches. I recommended the flexible approach based on our findings, which resonated strongly with stakeholders. We saw this as a direct solution to the flexibility Financial Professionals needed—ensuring a more intuitive and user-driven experience.
We iterated upon initial designs
Design Iterations and Feedback
Armed with insights from stakeholders interviews and heuristic analysis, I moved into design iterations—pressure-testing components from previous tools to ensure consistency while introducing new patterns where needed. We conducted three internal design reviews with stakeholders, refining our approach at each step.
Then, we got exciting news: we would finally be able to speak directly with Financial Professionals for design validation. This was a crucial moment, allowing us to test our assumptions and ensure our designs truly met user needs. We held six validation sessions, gathering invaluable feedback to fine-tune the experience.
Through this process, I designed 11 unique page types, each with multiple states to account for various user scenarios. In total, this resulted in 60+ screen designs and 15+ modal designs, all meticulously crafted to support seamless user flows and an intuitive experience.
Then put on the finishing touches
High Fidelity Designs
Through this process, I designed 11 unique page types, each with multiple states to account for various user scenarios. In total, this resulted in 60+ screen designs and 15+ modal designs, all meticulously crafted to support seamless user flows and an intuitive experience.
Applications "Dashboard"
• Familiar UI Alignment: The dashboard design naturally evolved to resemble another tool Financial Professionals were already using, improving familiarity and reinforcing visual harmony.
• Application Updates Panel: Crated another means for Financial Professionals to be updated on activity with the applications they managed and allowed them to directly navigate to those items to inquire about them, rather than exclusively relying on email communications.
• Content Refinements: Iterative content changes made key items more explicit and easier to understand.
• Seamless Ecosystem: Introducing the ability to open a new quote directly from the dashboard strengthened the sense of a connected ecosystem across the client’s tools.
Application Overview Page
• Landing Page Functionality: Served as the starting point for Financial Professionals when opening an application.
• Pre-Populated Information: Enabled auto-filling of application details from a previously completed quote, reducing completion time.
• Enhanced Navigation: Introduced breadcrumbs to help users track their progress through the application submission.
• Tabbed Navigation Success: Provided clear visibility of progress and allowed users to choose their own path through the application.
• Right Sidebar Enhancements: Surfaced key information, linked quotes for a connected ecosystem feel, and included a resource section for self-solving potential issues.
Various Application Information Pages
• Hierarchical Organization: Improved input field structure for better clarity and usability across application pages.
• Clear Required Fields: Marked all mandatory fields to enhance user experience and reduce errors.
• Error Handling per Usability Standards: Ensured errors were clearly communicated and easy to resolve.
• High-Visibility Error Indicators: Errors were flagged in both the tabbed navigation and a right-side dialogue box.
• Guided Error Resolution: Users could quickly identify and navigate to unresolved errors, improving efficiency.
Some reflections and future thoughts
While our team waits for deployment of the tool, we are confident that our designs will meet the expectations around maintaining the industry-leading adoption rates, building the user base and improving completion times.
Moving forward, I had some ideas as to what may help our client continue to grow and further this tool:
System Usability Score (SUS)
Create a baseline for how they would like to measure the usability of the tool. This would help create a metric around improvements that need to be made.
Innovation in Collaboration
During this effort, we were unable to reach a bit higher for more innovative solutions. Though in the future, I would like to create efforts around improving the collaboration between Financial Professionals and their clients. Clients often need assistance during the application phase. More targeted user research could uncover some opportunities to improve that friction seen today.
Regular Interviews with Financial Professionals
Not speaking to Financial Professionals until design validation hampered us from getting out in front of firsthand challenges they may experience today with the tool. We would have ultimately spoken with those individuals sooner in the experience, but I would encourage our client to regularly interview and validate design iterations to ensure the successes of new design implementations.