Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Sprint 5: Crossing the Ts, Dotting the Is

Wrapping up the spring semester.

Emerging Concepts

Following the double diamond approach to research, our team synthesized information from our primary research interviews to establish our leading insights and challenged our assumptions about insurance that we had originally formed at the inception of the project.

After solidifying our initial insights, we brainstormed different methods of intervention throughout the insurance buying experience that had the potential to increase users’ willingness to share information with their insurers. We identified the stage when users fill out a quote as the most accessible stage to the customer due to the direct contact between the insurance company when they provide personal information to complete the flow.

The 3 phases of the quote flow.

After an impact analysis, we narrowed it down to two initial concepts that we wanted to test with users to validate the need for such an intervention.

Using storyboards for generative research

We began testing the two concepts with a series of storyboarding sessions with various interviewees. These interviews gave us initial insight into the apprehensions, benefits, and repercussions of our proposed ideas. The think-aloud sessions were very useful as a preliminary step before the team created low fidelity prototypes to test with users.

New Directions

As we reach the end of research and transition into the design phase, our team is working towards developing a final presentation, report, and project website. Our biggest challenge is communicating complex concepts and mental models from our research to our audience by leveraging our communication design skills. These deliverables serve as an opportunity for the team to align on the future of the project and take a record of our findings so far. As we’ve been making progress on our deliverables, we have refined our problem statement and have identified new avenues for the team to explore.

The end of the spring term provided a great milestone for the team to step back and take everything we have discovered so far, allowing us to better frame our project. Working through these deliverables gave our project life in terms of story, direction, and future. As we centralized research and synthesized insights for these deliverables, we saw key themes and ideas emerge that are essential to truly understanding Progressive’s customers. These collaboration sessions for deliverables allowed each team member to voice their perspectives of users and stand as advocates for those that they interviewed. Bringing in all team members into these synthesis conversations allowed for greater representation within our research pool and lead to much more diverse and fulfilling insights.

Reflections

The team spent some time discussing some learnings and takeaways from the work done on the project so far.

1. Adopt a blue-sky approach. From the beginning, we thought that the requirements of the client were quite straightforward — they wanted to make more people bundle auto and property policies. Thus, we’ve focused on understanding the current experience of getting quotes on them and how to lower the barriers. However, our faculty mentors gave advice that we might want to expand the horizon to other policies since it would capture more triggers for people to consider bundling. I think it was a good call for us to take a pause and view our project at a distance. We also shared this idea with our clients and they showed their interest in having special lines as entry points for bundling. So, we are currently identifying the events and context of all insurance policies that let people look for new policies and it surely helps us to find more opportunities to expose the insurance.
2. Validate ideas consistently with clients. We have a regular weekly meeting with clients including sprint reviews. The agenda for the meeting varies but mostly it’s about sharing our updates on work. We try to structure the conversation to be productive while preparing for the meetings by having our ideas validated beforehand. The validation doesn’t have to be formal. It could just be going through think-aloud testing or rough ideation on our hypothesis. We found this helpful since the clients tend to give more detailed feedback. For example, when we shared our prototype ideas regarding AR experience for quoting, they told us that they considered AR in the past. In a nutshell, we had a productive conversation as we found out they are open to adopting new technologies and we could set our directions to push our ideas further. Again, this was possible because we had pre-validated our prototypes.
3. Time management is key. Our team also experienced delays and sometimes the buffer didn’t work. For example, when we were conducting our user interviews, we encountered many suspicious interviewees. Out of 6 interviews, 5 of them were invalid and we had to stop the interview and re-recruit which delayed our plan by a week. To salvage our time loss, we decided to start synthesizing the findings while conducting the 2nd round of interviews. This worked well as it not only shortened our time for the synthesis but also kept us on the same page and probed more about data privacy and tech literacy as we had seen those themes become important in our research during the interviews.

Summer Semester

As we continue to collaborate with our clients, we hope to dive into the summer semester by converging on insights from our conceptual prototypes. The summer will be filled with design iterations, prototyping, testing, and feedback sessions for the team to truly explore how to reimagine a digital experience best fitted for the customer's needs.