The Challenge
Reliance Life Insurance is by far the largest non-bank promoted private life insurer with over 10 million policyholders, a strong distribution network of over 900 branches and over 1,00,000 advisors.
As a leading insurance company, a key challenge was to help its users manage their policies on their own. While offering a host of features and functions, with a seamless digital user experience to self-service. In a competitive market for financial solutions, the company envisioned to be the preferred option for providing insurance through the provision of a comprehensive digital journey to provide solutions.
The prime intent of the project was to provide a virtual branch for their customers, addressing all their needs and pain points in the most efficient way.
Our Methodology
As a standard practice, Think Design team evaluated the project requirements and suggested to adapt the fast-growing User-Centered Design (UCD) approach. A visioning team was formed with a moderator, participants from the client’s team to work together in defining the UX Vision and Strategy.
Other than building a systemic understanding of the domain, user needs have to be captured to understand the scope of work involved. Our team tried to capture the typical user profiles who would be using the portal and identify their Goals, Needs and Concerns. This primarily helped us in role-playing the user, which is one of the key steps of User-Centered Design.
Based on the insights gathered a need-based information model approach was proposed to cater to all the use cases and provide an intuitive experiential approach to the customers. Once we arrived at a relatively simpler Information Architecture, Think Design team members started sketching up various ideas based on the directions from the UX workshop to give a shape to the product. Summarizing all the points mentioned and finalizing the navigation we moved ahead with the wireframes stage, followed by creating a visual design and HTML mockups.
KEY FEATURES
1. Browsing experience
The Design and Business teams were aligned on not making the structure too adventurous, given the nature of merchandise. We chose top navigation for ease of use and clarity on context to the user. Right column provided suggestions and quick access tools to the users throughout the site. Value-added UX features like timeline view enhanced the overall browsing experience.
2. Visual language
Visual language laid stress on content and the approach focused on bringing the merchandise to the forefront. The approach addressed requirements of brand, information hierarchy, consistency and clarity on the path to completion for the user.
3. Customer dashboard
This showcased a timeline view, informing users of previous actions, providing timely alerts and a quick guide to actions needed to be taken. By opening up task flows and helping users navigate through them seamlessly, transparency and visibility of information and tasks were achieved .
4. My funds
This became a key placeholder to view, track and manage funds with a consistent design language that ensured the right column placeholder for suggestions.
5. Responsive layout
It ensured that the user could use this portal at any time and on any device. A consistent structural and visual language ensured better comprehension and quicker time to task.
DESIGN ACTIVITIES
Consulting, Stakeholder Workshop, Wireframing, UI & Visual Design, Front End Development, Dev. Coordination.
CURRENT STATUS
Reliance Life Insurance’s revamped self service portal was launched in early 2016.
