Exploring the Art of the Possible for Underwriters | 2017
Beazley and Endava partnered on a six-week discovery engagement designed to elicit detailed information about the workflows, processes, and tools used by their staff to underwrite their insurance products - culminating in a findings and recommendations document.
Through stakeholder interviews, user research, and design thinking workshops, our team reached a deep level of understanding about the business challenges and user needs which allowed us to craft a vision for a new product based on five key principles - flexibility, self service, automation, data, and performance.
Beazley's CTO was so impressed with our thinking, they requested mockups to bring our ideas to life, allowing him to present our vision internally to drum-up support and funding.
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My Role
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Led the team responsible for Product Strategy, User Research and Product Design
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Collaborated with Beazley's Executive Team to understand their business goals, technical constraints, and existing systems
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Partnered with Beazley Product Owners to prioritize features to prototype for organizational buy-in
Understanding the Disjointed Ecosystem
We began discovery with a series of one-on-one stakeholder interviews to understand each executive's vision for the project and their personal goals. We also held a series of workshops to map out the overarching business strategy, current state workflows, user roles, and technical constraints. Sadly, there were no analytics in place for us to dive in to (we love data).
Throughout this process, we learned Beazley staff has to access five different applications to review and underwrite one insurance policy. The web apps were extremely dated, had serious usability issues, and did not talk to one another.
JobTraq: Workflow Tracking
Insight: Application Clearance
BPro: Policy Bind & Issue Process
Game Changer: Policy Quoting
Endorsements: Policy Coverages
With this foundational understanding, we conducted research with 20 users through either one-on-one interviews or contextual inquiries. We then mapped out the current state workflows, synthesized our research results, identified the many areas of friction, and developed our recommendations to improve the user experience.
While there were many opportunities for improvement, our top recommendation was to address Beazley's fractured workflow - allowing them to surpass their KPI goals for applications processed and increase employee satisfaction.
Beazley's CTO was so impressed with our output, he requested we create a mockup that brought our vision of a unified workflow application to life...in a week.
"...This is the best work ever done for Beazley."
- Head of Digital Platforms and US IT
Design Thinking Workshop and Concepts
We held a Design Thinking workshop with Beazley product owners and our team of designers and developers to ideate. We began by reviewing the insights we gleaned during discovery, and framed all of the design challenges into "How Might We" questions. Each team member sketched and presented their solutions, and a new workflow emerged.
Over the next three days, our Designers worked hand-in-hand with developers to design key screens for the new application.
Beazley: Insight Evolved
Key Screens That Brought the Big Ideas to Life
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Outcomes & Learnings
Outcomes
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Beazley was an existing client, but had never taken advantage of our Product Design capabilities until this strategy project
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This project led to new Beazley projects that included the UX team
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Learnings
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While not ideal, you can design a highly transactional POC in a week
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Collaboration within our design and tech teams was key - everyone sat next to each other for the entire week
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A strong Product Owner can help drive success
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We were lucky our PO was an SME with institutional knowledge that was able to shepherd us through the highly complex process of insurance underwriting
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