Background

Kaus was my first project during my time as a UX Academy student with Designlab.

ROLE: UX Design Student

DURATION: 6 Weeks

Overview

Kaus, a large and established insurance company, wants to sell their insurance policy packages online, directly to consumers.

With 30 years of experience selling their product through regional agents in the B2B environment, the company needs help shifting their complex, yet quality products to the digital sphere.

High-level goals included creating a new and fresh logo for the company, as well as design a responsive e-commerce website that is pleasing to use and that allows customers to browse through all products and easily filter by relevant data.

As the sole end-to-end UX/UI Designer leading the project, the duration of the redesign was approximately 6 weeks.

Research

The research phase involved on the following methods to collect and analyze data: three one-on-one remote interviews, competitor analysis and provisional personas, persona development, and storyboard development.

Through these research methods as well as defining the targeted user and ultimately the ideal persona, I was able to map out next steps of the process and narrow down the key elements I needed to focus on for this project.

Summary of Findings:

Customer needs focus on three key values - affordability, convenience, and quality of coverage. These three factors play a vital role in selecting the right insurance provider for them.
Their “wants” or “desires” in competitive providers lay heavily on more due diligence on the company’s part to explain benefits clearly and concisely on their respective sites, as well as easier websites to use.
All three participants were open to selecting insurance packages online, with the condition that it would be an easy process.
In some cases, important factors when deciding on provider differed when it came down to type of insurance coverage.

Define

Persona & Storyboard

The persona and storyboard development process revolved around results I collected from the interviews I conducted as well as the competitor analysis findings. The persona I chose to focus on demonstrated a key example of a hypothetical user who’s goals and decisions align with the goals of the project.

Information Architecture

Using a linear approach to each phase of the process, I conducted and delivered card sorting tests and results, created site sketches, and produced a site map.

Screen+Shot+2019-08-28+at+3.25.50+PM.png

Design

Interaction Design

The design phase included the task and user flow thought process, sketching and creating wireframes of the homepage, insurance categories page, and quoting process page, then prototyping the wireframes using InVision, and finally creating responsive wireframes for the homepage on Sketch.

I chose to build wireframes for the homepage, insurance categories page, the comparison tool module, and the quoting process page because they were all important pages to my developed persona’s values and goals.

UI Design

The UI and branding design process involved first creating the icon set, then putting together a moodboard that represents the goals I had for the UI for the Kaus site, followed by creating and iterating the brand logo and brand style tile.

Finally I created a UI kit that included all of the UI design decisions made that can be handed off to a design team.

I chose a monochromatic color palette of blues and grays, with the addition of a hint of off-white to keep the palette feeling warm and inviting. Blue is known to invoke a sense of calm and ease, and I felt that this was important for the brand image while staying clean and modern.

Screen%2BShot%2B2019-07-07%2Bat%2B3.44.29%2BPM.jpg

Screen+Shot+2019-07-07+at+3.44.38+PM.jpg

Test

The final phase of the process involved creating the high fidelity prototype with InVision, in-person usability testing with three users, creating an affinity map to break down the user feedback, and determining next steps which included priority revisions and additional user testing.

Usability testing involved asking the user to navigate to the life insurance package options and observing how many paths they took to get there, as well as any obstacles they came across in the process. I also had the users navigate to the “compare plans” module I designed and observed the interactions.

Conclusion

The challenges I often faced throughout this project were my inexperience with graphic and visual design, and that the UI design phases took much longer than anticipated because this process is still quite new for me. I learned that this process cannot be rushed, and that much of the answers lie within the journey of getting to the end result.

The key takeaways from the Kaus project are learning to design for the user rather than for ourselves as designers, and learning the basics of the typical UX design process for an established company. If I were to further improve this project, I would iterate on my high fidelity designs and collect more usability testing feedback to gain more knowledge on what can be further improved.

I am very proud of the entire project, but particularly the amount of growth I can already see in my work and in my visual design process. I know that with more practice and experience I will gain more skills and confidence in my design work.

back to homepage