A UX Review of Lemonade Insurance in Less Than 5 Minutes

Elizabeth
ProductSins
Published in
5 min readOct 1, 2020

Disclaimer: Lemonade Insurance has done nothing to deserve this review…except IPO which caught my attention.

There’s a video!?

That’s right folks. If video’s your jam, you’re welcome.

(Reader: “But Elizabeth, I’m on Medium because I like reading…”)

Product Sins Lemonade Insurance

Why Lemonade?

Lemonade IPO’ed on July 2, 2020. They were already familiar to me — in pre-COVID New York, I’ve seen hundreds of ads on the subway, billboards, everywhere.

Lemonade has branded itself the insurance for millennials. So let’s give it to good ol’ user experience rundown!

Landing Page

This was hands-down beautiful. Its simple imagery with black hand drawings emphasized the CTA of bright pink. This color palatte — stunning.

It’s very clear what is the next step — click the beautiful CTA.

Functionality in Feature Vid

Scrolling through the landing page, I see a video of how Lemonade Insurance works. Let’s watch it! (That’s the theme of this Product Sins challenge btw)

Feature wise — the app seems to be an insurance update tracker’s dream including functionality for:

  1. Check savings
  2. Adding additional members — spouse, dependent, pet
  3. Purchase extra home insurance

Landing Page Part 2

Testimonials aren’t clickable. Are these real people!? Guess I’ll trust the beautifully-branded insurance website.

But kidding aside, my overall landing page impressions: strong message strength, beautiful branding, feature-heavy app, clear call to actions.

Price of Lemonade

Ok — time to finally click the bright pink CTA “Check out our Prices”. My expectation is that clicking will give me free and premium plans. But sneaky Lemonade actually pulls me straight into the onboarding.

17 questions later, and I’ve emerged.

To a PRICE. A real honest-to-goodness price for home and renter’s insurance.

Onboarding wise — this is clever. It’s very smart for the bait-and-switch survey to be:

  • short (questions took me ~1.5min to complete)
  • to the point (all 17 answers were presumably used for calculating some thingiemidgig)
  • removing all progress bars (was I at the nearly at the end!?)

Thankfully my information extraction lasted less than 2minutes so my queries were in short suspense before clarity.

1 Minute “Magic” Moment

Magic moments are value you couldn’t get or would have to work much harder to get elsewhere. I measure this at the 1 and 5 minute junctures. At 1 minute, you haven’t invested information or time in the product.

1 min “magic moment” = first impression

And Lemonade Insurance has ceremoniously pushed me into the 1min magic moment.

First Impression: it’s a beautiful experience.

Holy Guacamole. You’re telling me that my 1.5min of survey input gave enough information to output me a price!?

Talk about MAGIC. This was revolutionary for me. I couldn’t believe how incredibly easy it seemed!

5 Minute Magic Moment

You got me.

I’m on the platform with a quote. And within this page is all these different coverage amounts — variables I could increase/decrease. What what!? I can increase the amount for…reconstruction costs and see real time how my total monthly price is affected!

BONKERS. MIND BLOWN. HOLY COW.

At this point, I’ve reviewed many onboarding experiences — and this was hands down the easiest. Usually at 5min, I have to complete an unhelpful tool tips tutorial and touch 10 different features that I won’t remember in 2min anyway.

But within 5 min, by playing around with which options I did and didn’t want insurance on, I was able to LOWER my price.

There was even an “extra coverage” area!

Additional Value

Top right — button “Get Discounts”. More discounts!? Give it to me!

So I answered additional questions about my past claims (which, thankfully, have been very little) and which safety devices do I have installed.

Now, Lemonade Insurance isn’t checking these safety claims so, what if I selected “fire protection” and did NOT have it? This “additional discounts” left me unsure — what if I was completely incorrect about my house protections?

If something did happen, would I still be liable for damage?

Is Lemonade a Scam!?

Talk about hilarity — Lemonade’s low price and First Time UX of Lemonade was so good…I paused and wrote in my Google search “Is Lemonade a scam?”

Although the claims process can be a little obscure, blogs and reviews of Lemonade were clear: no scam here.

The Hardest Metric: Grit Score!

The hardest metric of all is the grit score: how “gritty” of a perspective customer do I need to be to get that beautiful magic success moment?

Do I need to put in 10min of time to understand the product? That’s excellent for First Time UX — Grit Score is 1 (aka I do NOT need to be a gritty user to make my way through the product).

Do I need to put in 1hr of time? That’s hard to ask a prospect who has never stepped onto your platform. Grit Score is 8 then.

And so… (drumroll please) I am giving Lemonade a score of 1 out of 10.

This is the best grit score I have ever given! And they’ve hands down earned it with their excellent first time user experience.

Let’s Wrap Up

Lemonade!

I highly highly congratulate you on working so hard on UX of your product. Claims aside, the bait-and-switch to achieve information and start users on the onboarding journey is one of the cleverest flows I’ve encountered.

Written by Elizabeth Ferrao, founder and Chief Conversion Officer of Product Mindset, a top-ranked UX+Product Agency. We solve conversion and churn problems by transforming the first time UX.

Learn how to create a converting funnel with our “FTUX Method” cheat sheet!

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Elizabeth
ProductSins

Founder @ EMO (Easy Mobile Onboarding). Product Teacher @GA. Co-founder @WomenWhoCodeNYC. Ex-software engineer @ Time Inc.