HCF Insurance

Starting this role as a UI Consultant for HCF, I eventually moved into the Lead Designer role in HCF’s main digital transformation project - Marketplace. Managing a team of up to 7 UX designers at a time, I have been leading the redesign of HCF digital design systems, refreshing look and feel of their digitals assets and restructing the information architecture and improving the user’s ability to understand the products in order to make more informed decisions at the outset of their quote journeys.

This huge investment involved reconsidering the look and feel of the current assets and working with brand to design new foundational elements for a design system and was the start of a transformational project to pivot the brand from being known as primarily a healthcare provider to a true 'marketplace' for all insurance needs.

Using this scope I led our team to create brand new componentry, templates and ready-for-dev pages for handover to production, while also working with an updated IA, introducing new sections and tools to lay the groundwork for the project which I scoped, planned and did performed the majority of UX research for - Marketplace stage 1b.

Homepage redesign

This was a self-started project to redesign and reimagine the HCF homepage. Initial showcases to the business were so well received that I almost unexpectedly got the green light to test 3 variations of these designs live using A/B testing.

These designs were a complete overall of current HCF designs and had some distinct goals -

• Reskin and lightly rebrand HCF digital assets for a cleaner, more minimalistic, modern and ultimately more usable interface. Removing the clutter so the user can interact with what is actually important to them
• Rethinking what kind of information a new user would like to see on the homepage. Rather than bombarding them with information without context, lead the user into the quote funnels with more of a storytelling element rather than being strictly product focused
• Give more prominence to different products that HCF offers. Rather than only being known as a Health insurance company, let users more easily browse products like Life, Travel, Pet by giving them some prominence on the Homepage and easily categorising the stories being told
• A redesign of the Homepage-facing Health Quote funnel, testing the questions in a different design format so that users may skip a number of questions within the flow for a faster initial quote experience.

These ideas and initial designs were extremely well-received by the business overall and our design leader was impressed by the strategies proposed through the designs and the self-initiated nature of the project, which led to her recommendation of myself to lead the design of the Marketplace project, resulting in my promotion to Lead Designer.

Version 1 was the eventual winner - allowing the product sets to be more immediately visible on the home page, while creating a cleaner interface by removing a lot of the uneccessary clutter from current design. This allows the user to focus better on what matters to them and what they are looking for.

Without proper qualitative research, my guess as to why Version 2 performed better than Version 3 would be that V3 may have sacrificed a lot of in-situ and contextual information about the products for speed in completion of the initial quote funnel. The design did not allow for enough space/time for the user to understand the product and the information that they were providing to fully invest in the process.

Both design V1 + 2 vastly outperformed the control which was the current state sales website, so this was a very successful project either way and will lead and inform what the team does within the Marketplace 1b project.

HCF Design System

My team was given a very short time frame to deliver the Marketplace 1a information architecture redesign (approximately 3 months), and a large part of the requirements for this project included a complete redesign of the look and feel of the Sales-facing website ie. a new design system.

The current digital experience at HCF was dated, cluttered, did not meet WCAG accessibility standards, had no UX thinking behind the digital brand assets, did not use scalable graphics and the overall repetitive use of limited components made the visual layout of the website difficult to navigate for the user.

Another strategy we wanted to implement was to redefine the use of colour and space on the website. On the current site, everything from Buttons to Containers to Components are all designed with hard, sharp edges. These designs are shown to perform well on corporate websites, but for an business whose reputation is built on health and being not-for-profit. We used friendly rounded corners on almost every element of the design system.

The HCF Primary Ruby is an acute colour which immediately draws the eye to it, but if used excessively unfortunately reminds users a little too much of the pattern of an alert or warning, which is not what you want users to feel when first entering the sales website for Health insurance.

We wanted to use this Ruby in an active way, by only allowing Primary buttons on the website if they were leading users down through high engagement paths - namely, directing users to the Quote funnel / transactional part of the website. The reduction of Ruby use to only the most important elements of the site actually strengthens it’s use as a brand asset. We also aimed to create more white space for elements to breathe and to guide the users eyes for travelling through the website with more focus.

Through using advanced Figma tools like auto-layout, tokenisation, strict spacing semantics and complete documentation including CSS for dev handoever, we were able to deliver a robust, reusable, pixel-perfect and development friendly Design System to accommodate not only basic layouts but completely new functionalities with a new updated typography scale. All this within our tight timeline, and it was extremely well-received by the business all around.

Marketplace 1a project - IA & Global elements

Marketplace is essentially a long-term digital transformation project which includes reimagining how HCF products and digital assets are presented, adding modern intelligence tools to the quote funnels, and improving the UX/UI of the digital assets to meet WCAG accessiblilty standards and responsive design (and making it look a lot nicer).

These are the main optimisations that we aimed to improve through this project -

• Completely redesign the main navigation and menus so that they offer clear next steps, including restructure of information architecture of health-related products to guide the user and allow them to find what they need faster
• Based on competitive analysis recommendations, to create a new 'Find Health Insurance' section with various informational landing pages and direct access to the quote funnel
• To redesign the functionality and information architecture of the huge FAQ section so that it is consolidated into a single area on the site where users can easily access this important information.

Information architecture and Global Header / Footer key considerations

When given the remit to redesign what was a cluttered and confusing UI in the global header, these were our key considerations taking into account the new information architecture.

• Minimise cognitive load a large number of options can lead to choice paralysis and unintentionally sending users to the wrong page. Using nudge-based architecture helps to ensure we are sending users down a desired path
• Site depth Users should be able to make it to their required destination with a minimal amount of clicks while still being exposed to the relevant information that will improve their likelihood of action or engagement
• Mobile use Navigation will need to operate slightly differently on mobile with clear next steps maintaining visibility on a smaller screen and sufficiently sized tap targets
• Consistency Using consistent labelling, and button designs to ease user's understanding of what pag

By replacing the current nav menu with the current actual product line and restructuring the IA to include informational sections such as 'Find..' which lead directly to the transaction funnel, we successfully reduced cognitive loads for the user and greatly simplified the user journey to successful conversion pages.

Find Health Insurance

One of the main additions to the sales website that we wanted to implement was a new section which would allow users to find the type of Health insurance that they need through separate informational landing pages categorised by the most popular cover-types. This would give users an alternative way obtain an initial quote while providing them contextual information that they require to make their decision, as well as giving us an opportunity to show them the different unique selling points and benefits they would get by joining HCF as opposed to other providers.

On each bespoke landing page, we would also offer users a quicker way to obtain an initial quote by essentially providing some of main questions we need answered on the landing page itself, possibly leading directly to a Product selection page. This is made possible because the business now understands the type of product the user is looking for and is able to offer them a recommendation.

In Marketplace project 1b, we would aim to take this data retrieved and potentially personalise the sales website both for their current visit, and also for future visits assuming they had not yet completed their initial quote. We would aim to be able to ‘nudge’ the user to the next steps of completing their quote flow with the ultimate aim of getting them to the quote summary pages and ultimately into the transactional process.

FAQs

Health insurance is a complicated and at times overwhelming product choice and although our overall plan was to minimise the content to what is most important to get the user to next steps, it's important for users in this journey to also have a way to access further information that they may be curious about that is not presented directly on the information pages, letting the user understand the process or products in greater detail to further inform their decision.

The previous state where the FAQs were situated in many different sections of the site without a central repository was problematic both for user's usage of the site, and SEO as well. We consolidated the huge amount of content in the FAQs to a single page or section which is designed dynamically so that the content will change according to the in-page navigation on the left. This allowed us to retain the massive amounts of copy required for this section, while making it much more user and SEO-friendly while giving the business a baseline for how the FAQs should be approached for their other products.

The previous state where the FAQs were situated in many different sections of the site without a central repository was problematic both for user's usage of the site, and SEO as well. We consolidated the huge amount of content in the FAQs to a single page or section which is designed dynamically so that the content will change according to the in-page navigation on the left. This allowed us to retain the massive amounts of copy required for this section, while making it much more user and SEO-friendly while giving the business a baseline for how the FAQs should be approached for their other products.

Marketplace 1b - Homepage and Quote funnel UX strategy and planning

With completion and launch of Marketplace stage 1a, I was invlolved in leading the research, strategy and baseline UX for 1b. This stage had the scope of enhancing the PHI quote funnel user experience by integrating a needs-based quiz and a product recommendation tool. This is a huge step for the organisation and the vast majority of transactions at HCF move through these health products, and as well the brand is currently mostly known as a health-provider. We would design various paths into the Health funnnel such a direct path, objectives / needs based path and an information-led path (Find Health..).

Within the pre-UX Service Design stage of the project, we conducted 2 rounds of user testing and then competitive analysis to verify our understanding of what users wanted within these funnels and how we could simplify the experience for them at a high level while moving them through the funnel as quickly possible for highest website engagement, while redesigning the current weak points around the flow. This involved at first understanding the data behind user drop-off points, and then keying on a rethinking and conducting user research around these key pages, while integrating them with the new dynamic tools which are now being built in the back-end.

At the end of the process, we understood exactly where wthe current experience was lacking in terms of usability problems and I was alble to lead the overall team to build a high-level set of wireframes, inlcuding variations, and working prototypes of a reimagined flow experience as the project kicked off. I believe that with this pre-work I have set the team up for success as they tackle the UI elements of 1b, use qaulitative testing to validate these decisions, and ultimately use the Design System that we newly created to integrate the new flow and prepare it for development.

I do believe that this project reimagining could have a massive impact on the engagement level and ultimately the completed online transactional appeal at HCF Insurance as they look to bring their digital assets into the post-Covid world.