UX case study: Redesigning the insurance overview page for AkademikerPension
I spend 4 months with DAY21, a digital design agency specialised in research, strategy and design. I joined the agency to work with them and AkademikerPension on their members portal.
About the project
We were a mix of developers, designers and data analysts etc., some from DAY21 and some from AkademikerPension, all working closely together on the online members portal.
This blog post is about how we redesigned the insurance overview page, a small piece of all the work we did together. But a good example of how to test with users (we call them members) and how you can end up finding something you did not expect but improved the product experience by a lot.
You never know what you will find
Testing with members
Testing with members was something new to the team, but everyone was really eager to try it. We invited 5 members in, each in very different stages of life and with different levels of knowledge within pension and insurance. We handed them a Figma prototype and asked them to go through it while explaining each step to us.
The first thing we wanted to test was a recommendation tool we had been working on — a tool to help members understand if they are covered in a way that fits them and their life.
Our main findings
We were focused on figuring out if our recommendation tool was designed in a way that members could use and understand. But actually, we found some critical more important problems with the insurance overview page while testing.
- The page feels overwhelming
The insurance overview page feels overwhelming when members land on it. Visually the participants found it hard to get an overview at first glimpse, we heard the phrase: “Ok these are my insurances.. let me just have a look.. eh”. - The different insurances are hard to understand
All members needed some time to go through each insurance to truly understand it. One participant said: “Ahh this means that.. if I get sick.. my kids will get this amount of money”, which underlined that we had a problem with labelling and structure.
How we used the findings
Even though this wasn’t the feedback we were looking for, we quickly agreed that these findings were very important and that we needed to prioritise them.
Already during the user interviews, we started getting ideas on how to solve the problems. There was already a design system in place and very little development resources, so our job was to use what we already got in order to solve the problems. So instead of inventing completely new design modules and solutions, we looked around and used what already existed on the platform.
- A less overwhelming page
We wanted to visually try to make the page seem less overwhelming. Our idea was to introduce icons and a colour for each type of insurance, to visually make it easier for users to distinguish between the different insurance products. - Renaming insurances
This was almost given to us by our members, “Ahh this means that.. if I get sick.. my kids will get this amount of money” — We used this sentence to rename and restructure each insurance by; life event, who will get the money and what amount will they get.
After having mocked this new direction we shared it with the team and the organisation. Even though the change might seem small, it was important to get everyone's buy-in early on in the process. A big in order to get buy-in was the results from the user testing, it made it very obvious that these were important problems to solve.
So we tested this new insurance overview page with a group of members, and it was very obvious that our changes had been for the better!
The end!
So even if this wasn’t really what we were looking to improve when we started testing, it was clear to us that the findings were important and enough to fix for us to prioritise them. So this was a good example of why involving users sometimes means discovering unexpected things
And thanks to a fantastic team, we were able to work in an agile and user-centric way and implement design changes based on learnings.
Thanks to David, Agnete, DAY21 and AkademikerPension! ❤
About me
I’m a freelance UX designer and researcher with almost 10 years of experience building digital products and services. I’m a Hyper Island alumni and have been working with big global brands and small startups within mobility, retail, healthcare, the public sector etc.
You can read more about my work on my Medium publication or reach out using rikkekoblauch@gmail.com 💌
