Sureify

UX INTERNSHIP SUMMER 2017 – PRESENT

The summer of 2017, I interned at a seed funded insurtech startup called Sureify at their headquarters in San Jose, California. Sureify focuses on building enterprise engagement tools for Life Insurance companies. As a UX intern, I performed market research, restructured their backend platform IA and designed new features for their web and mobile offerings.

About Sureify

Sureify has built a white-labelled enterprise software platform (LifeTime platform) that enables life insurers to acquire, engage, and cross-sell throughout a customer’s lifetime. The LifeTime platform constitutes the following features:

Analytics

Insurer engagement and data analytics center

Market Research

I performed market research to get acclimated to the Life insurance industry and identify the different types of Life Insurance startups present in the market. Below I have distilled the knowledge gained in short bites supported by visuals for better understanding. The insurance startup industry has mainly focused on five categories

1.  Life Insurance Apply & Buy Startups

These startups have created their own life insurance policies and are backed by big re-insurers like Fidelity, Hannover RE, MassMutual, Vantis, etc. They are essentially digital life insurance companies that could be building a digital life insurance platform for their re-insurers.

2.  Life Insurance companies using the Vitality program

These are insurance companies that adopted the Vitality Health and Wellness solution for their policyholders. Vitality is used by health and life insurance companies to reward policyholders to maintain an active lifestyle. They offer incentivized points-based challenges to redeem points on gift cards, movie tickets, etc. Vitality is fairly widespread and adopted by major insurance organizations around the world. Similar to Vitality, there are Virgin Pulse and go365 that follow the same approach for other industries like corporate and private organizations.

3. Building a white label product for insurance companies

These are startups that not only follow a similar model as Vitality for health and wellness, but also are creating a white-label product for life insurance companies to better engage with their policyholders. These startups provide the insurance companies access to a lifetime worth of health data to improve their insurance policies for the betterment of their policyholders.

4. Insurance companies investing in wearables

Wearables are here to stay and they are being leveraged by many startups in auto, health and life insurance. Startups in auto insurance are creating automobile tracking devices to monitor the health of a vehicle to improve auto insurance for their customers. Eg. Metromile and Progressive. Health insurance startup, Oscar is partnering with Fossil for misfit wearables and AXA a large life insurance corporation is using Withings Pulse for their customers.

5. AI focused on-demand consumer products insurance startups

These startups are the most heavily funded of them of all. Property & Casualty startups offer protection for home and renters insurance and on-demand consumer goods like a cellphone, expensive jewelry, etc. The uniqueness of these startups is that they are AI focused with conversational UI based apply and buy process. They also offer rapid claims resulting in a fast and pleasant claim experience.

Where does Sureify stand right now?

Where should Sureify aim to be?

Heuristic Evaluation

I performed Heuristic Evaluation of the mobile app experience to identify usability problems with the app interface. Below I have mentioned a few issues I discovered based on the heuristic principles suggested by the Nielsen Norman Group.

1. No provision to resolve access code errors

Users do not have an instant solution to resolve access code errors incase the user forgets his/her access code. Although the help documentation mentions the required solution, it would be better if the user is directed upfront.

Heuristic – Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

2. Repeated text and improper use of whitespace

Repeated text elements and an obscure close icon. The video text should provide more context to the user about the contents of the video.

Heuristic – Aesthetic and minimalist design

3. Contact support error message

Error message should offer an action that guides the user to a solution. The system informs user about error information but no action. The system design needs to employ options to contact support if the system crashes or becomes unresponsive.

Heuristic – Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

Information Architecture

My main task in this internship was to rethink the design of the current insurer engagement and data analytics platform of Sureify. The design of the existing system was broken and the information architecture wasn’t in the right place to scale the product with additional features. Sureify needed an effective IA.

The questions asked while auditing the application

Step 2

Documenting the existing IA and identifying problems

1. We found a mismatch between the primary navigation elements and the content displayed 2. Discrepancy between the organization of the primary navigational elements and corresponding secondary elements. 3. The IA was not scalable to accommodate new application features 4. Overall, the navigational structure needed a revamp I whiteboarded the current system sitemap and analyzed the relationship between the primary and secondary navigation. I was looking for patterns where I can club similar pages together which logically make the most sense.

Fig. Existing system sitemap

Step 3

Card Sorting

Performing card sorting with the lead designer of the team helped me logically identify and narrow down the different pages of the insurer engagement center.

Fig. Analyzed the current system sitemap and performed card sorting activity

The Outcome

I came up with a scalable structure which gave Sureify a place to logically add new secondary features under the correct primary elements.

Fig. Rethinked Sitemap

Fig. Existing Insurer Engagement Center

Fig. Redesigned Insurer engagement center

Primary Navigation The existing navigation structure was enclosed in a drop-down menu which reduced the visibility of the available options. It was also confusing for the user to differentiate between the primary and secondary navigation.

Fig. Difficult to differentiate between primary and secondary navigation.

Rethinking the primary header

Fig. Existing header

Post card sorting I was able to come up with the essential higher level navigation structure which eliminated the dropdown menu. The unused whitespace gave me enough space to effectively organize the primary navigation elements. This increased discoverability of the higher order pages.

Fig. Redesigned header

Secondary Navigation and Sub Menus The arrowheads and highlights in the sub-menu were confusing since both the feature and sub feature were highlighted. The redesign corrected the collapse/expand arrowheads and only the expanded menu and selected feature were highlighted. To make the active state clear, we prefixed a colored border. This made the feature selection clear.

Fig. Existing sidebar (left) and Redesigned sidebar (right)

After the IA and navigation was organized the challenging part was to design all the internal screens. Due to NDA reasons I cannot share all my designs here. I designed 150+ screens. The screens are been tested and will be soon under development. This redesign is one of the biggest changes Sureify has made to their insurer engagement backend and I am glad to make an impact on it.

Fig. Insurer Engagement Dashboard (Backend)