London
Reinventing a Global Insurer's B2C Private Health Insurance Proposition and Digital Services.
Every once in a while, a project comes along that really allows you to create a massive change. It’s rare. There has to be bold leadership on the client’s side, hunger for change, dissatisfaction with what they currently have, and the desire to start from scratch.
Over 42 weeks – spanning more than 1,000 process variants and identifying up to £1.1bn in potential digital product revenue – I helped define, design and validate an entirely new health insurance product, set of digital services, and the foundations of a design system to support long-term growth.
During this two-year programme, my role evolved.
In the strategy phase, I supported the creation of the business’s future-state experience maps – large-format artefacts designed to express the organisation’s ambition in its entirety. This involved extensive current and future-state process mapping, stakeholder interviews, and deep synthesis to reach a coherent target model.
During the design phase, I led a stream of work focused on defining how customers manage their health insurance plan digitally. This meant service blueprinting, wireframing, prototyping, defining user stories, and shaping the first build of the new product.
Towards the latter stages of the programme, I supported the growing client-side design team in rolling out the initial builds — including contributing to the creation of a new design language and foundational design system for ongoing evolution.
Version 1 launched in Q2 2023.
The opportunity
Insurance carries some complex assumptions. It's the only product that penalises you for using it. It's one of the few products that routinely punishes loyal customers. It’s also only useful when something bad happens, but it's of no value when things go well. Couple this with an economic backdrop of rising insurtech investments and our client was approaching the cliff-edge, fast.
It sounded dire, but really, the situation meant that there was an abundance of untapped commercial potential that the market had yet to realise. This is where our relationship struck gold as we embarked on our mission to put our clients' existing business... out of business and future-proof it for the coming decade.
From the very beginning, we set out to achieve some straightforward strategic and commercial objectives. Together, we wanted to build a new type of insurance product system: an abstracted product model that separates what is available from how it is packaged and sold to customers, ensuring full flexibility in future product offers. We also wanted to ensure that the organisation maintained and improved their customer value, satisfaction, and retention rates to be the highest in the market.
The value of a vision, visualised
This was a broad, complex project from start to finish. It required multiple modes of thinking and required you to consider different contexts at every turn. That is why I believe that the most impactful part of the programme early on was the creation of five futurestate experience maps that illustrated how a digital-first business strategy would enable a radical transformation in the way our client conducts its business.
Each was an illustrative representation of how the experience would be transformed for key user groups, highlighting new capabilities required to support the target futurestate. They were the vision for everyone to align behind.
My role in the creation of these experience maps was to lead the development of the current and futurestate process maps behind the current and target features. This was integral to the success of these experience maps, as they became the foundational knowledge for what was and what was not possible to create based on our clients' current state and potential technology architecture.
These process maps were created over 6 weeks and some ~40 in-depth stakeholder interviews to understand everything from how customer calls were logged to how a customer's address was changed. Over this 6 week stint I held frequent workshops with the Insight team at Wilson Fletcher to combine the behind-the-scenes knowledge of processes with the ongoing customer research initiatives to collaboratively map out what our clients' future-state experience could be.
These maps grounded the ambition in operational reality. They clarified what was possible, what required change, and what architectural decisions would need to be made.
They became the reference point for alignment.
Designing from the ground up
Fast-forward into the second year of this transformation programme and I was leading a stream of work to define the digital experience of how people manage their health insurance plan. It sounds mundane but due to the nature of an abstracted product model and our ambition for customers to effectively ‘change’ components of their plan mid-term, we were dealing with the design of some very new concepts in the insurance world.
Fundamentally, our brief was to create a way for customers to access and manage their (and their families) insurance subscription and benefits.
This process was centred by insights generated during the strategy phase of the programme uncovering the fact that customers often misunderstood or couldn't find what they were covered for under their insurance in the first place. It led us to ensuring the accessibility and visibility of a customer's insurance product and benefits before anything else. The final designs focused on giving customers the appropriate level of context at every level of their plan details – getting more detailed as they delved deeper and wanted to know more.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to designing this experience was aligning how customers were able to make mid-term adjustments with the technology, underwriters and legal teams. To unlock the complexity of this challenge, I facilitated a series of co-design sessions with stakeholders from each team to visually create the process maps required to define the customer experience – basically, letting them do the hard work whilst I asked questions and mapped out their answers as an experience.
It provided some fascinating insights into the intricacies of underwriting, and ultimately refined our understanding of the internal challenges our client would have to deliver this part of the experience. This directly resulted in us delivering a digital experience for customers that was easy to use for them and compatible with our client's future internal processes.
Outcome
I'm immensely proud of everything that we achieved and created over this two-year period. Knowing I played a small part in such a radical re-imagining of our clients' digital services will sit well with me for a long time.
This program came to a close once we had delivered an all-new digital product proposition, an all-new customer experience for individual, business, and intermediaries audiences, and an all-new cross-device design system to equip our clients' growing design and development teams for the future.
Version 1 of this project will be live in Q2 2023.
Global health insurance company [NDA]
Client
2020 – 2022
Year
London (Hybrid)
Location
Service Designer – Jack Strachan, Lead experience design – Stephanie Fletcher, Lead UX – Harry Bond, Lead Product – Julie Jouault
Core team