Legal & General America is a life insurance provider in the United States. Formerly known as Banner Life & William Penn, my job was to mainly lead the design efforts on their back-office underwriting platform. In the beginning of 2019 they successfully launched a pilot browser-based life insurance application. As I joined we expanded on this first step with a suite of back-office applications for use by Underwriters, Case Managers, Advisors and other stakeholders in the life cycle of the life insurance application journey.
Client:
Legal & General America (LGA)
Year:
2019
Service Offered:
User Research, Competitive Analysis, Wireframing, Lo-Fi Design, Hi-Fi Design, Prototyping, Information Architecture, User Interviews
The beginning phase of my journey to design this large underwriting platform was to really understand the life insurance business. I had to start from the ground up to dive deep into the details of the life insurance journey. There are many different ways a customer even signs up for a quote or an estimate. Tons and tons of nuance that one could only understand by stepping into the shoes of that underwriter/case manager. So for the first two months of me joining the project I had to understand the business and ask lots and LOTS of questions.
Why do we need an underwriting workbench?
Who will be using this platform? What are their roles and what do they want to achieve on this platform?
What companies are doing something similar? What can we use as 'inspiration' instead of re-inventing the wheel?
Little by little we started filling in the gaps and answering these questions with the help of the users themselves.
To understand this I first needed to understand underwriting. Underwriting gives insurers a clearer look at a customer’s health history and background and determines their premiums. When a customer applies for life insurance, an underwriter evaluates their application details and health information to give them an insurance classification. With this initial information our team came up with a core set of functionalities.
Case details
Application tracker
Kanban board of required tasks, evidence or rules
Document repository
Problem Statement: Underwriters need a way to quickly and easily access consumer application information to decide what level of risk this customer has.
Examine applicant’s health history, background, lifestyle
Manage risk
Determine premiums
Problem Statement: Case managers need a way to quickly and easily provide consumer application information to support the underwriters in getting an application ready for underwriting.
Order any outstanding requirements such as medical forms or lab exams
Expedite any processes that are taking too long
Act as points of contact for applicants, agents and any other involved parties
Problem Statement: Agents need a way to quickly and easily track their customer's applications so that they may aid in expediting retreival of customer information.
Work hand in hand with applicants
Frequently fill out the entire application on applicant’s behalf
Need to see the status of the application
Resolve any outstanding requirements that are still pending to expedite process
I did a little competitive analysis on what was already out on the market. Of course companies don’t publicly display what they’re using for their back-office applications online so it took some digging to find some but I did find some examples and I analyzed what might work for us and what we could do differently at LGA.
Throughout the process I did a lot of lo-fi wireframes while I was doing research so I could visualize my understanding. Getting my thoughts out quickly and showing team members what I was thinking allowed us to save time and allowed me to get out early stage designs quickly without worrying about branding, colors and type.
Once the team and I agreed on a wireframe I continued to work on a lo-fi black and white wireframe for layout and placement purposes.
A key step throughout our process was to get immediate user feedback so we know in fact we are designing something that will achieve their needs. At least for the MVP release anyway.
We went through many iterations of the designs until we came up with something that the users were happy with. There are always things here and there that could be better and we did our best to continuously iterate and record their feedback as best we could.
Prototyping allowed me to demo our designs to stakeholders, developers, designers, product owners, BAs and other interested parties. It also allowed for an easy hand off to developers as they could inspect and download assets directly from the prototypes themselves. Their they could see what type we’re using, color palette, spacing guidelines and etc.
https://lgamerica.invisionapp.com/share/KMTG1089JV7#/screens?browse
https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/K2ZAAFW76FG#/screens?browse
Constant feedback was important throughout the process to make sure we were designing in the right direction.
Of course until now we continue to make improvements on functionalities the users use most often. I try to ask myself what can we do better? How can we improve the design processes? And most importantly how can we be better advocates for our end users?