Project Background
An insurance company was a long existing client of Velvet Onion’s. As part of one of their projects, they wanted to explore different products of single item insurance and test its market validity. We were engaged for research, 4 one week sprints and a final week for preparing the final assets for handover. I was part of the project team, assisting ideation, wireframing, prototyping and testing.
Goals/the problem
- Identify the potential market
- Design and Validate
The process and my involvement
Research (not involved) - The start of the project, the team spoke to 6 people that fit the target demographic of young professional living in/close to the city, to understand their needs and what they would consider/want to insure. Three of the participants had home contents insurance, the others either didn’t or had in the past. Which gave us insight as to what they valued, why it needed to be protected and why they did/didn’t have contents insurance to protect it.
Design Sprint, each week a new prototype was made and tested with 4 participants.
Week 1 (not involved) - First week of design, this week's focus was on getting an initial idea into a prototype to test at the end of the week, the prototype enabled you to add a MacBook to a list or inventory and get protection(insurance) for that item.
Week 2 (Testing Only) - Second week of design, aimed to flesh out the experience in order to better communicate the product and the initial action of adding of an item. I joined the project team at this stage and assisted the Usability testing of this sprint’s prototype, taking notes as an observer. This was done in the form of post-it notes with one idea and stuck directly to a print out of the screen. After testing we debriefed with the team on the early findings before later synthesising these for Monday.
Week 3 - Third week of design focused on developing the insurance form of the app, adding protection to an item. During this time other changes based on the previous weeks testing were updated to reflect the participants feedback. This week also featured development of visual design which was applied for the prototype. I worked with Tim (project lead) to ideate the form’s flows and layout at the start of the week. On Wednesday I began wireframing while Tim developed the visual design, later that day we had our mid week check-in with the rest of the client-side team to discuss the proposed designs for this weeks sprint and get an early round of feedback. With some small changes in the morning Thursday was focused on developing the Invision prototype and creating the necessary screens for the main flow and state changes. Friday was testing and followed a similar format to the previous weeks. In order to synthesise the findings quicker, we debriefed quickly after each test and pulled out the key findings for that participant.
Week 4 - The final sprint week was focused on finishing the product, which was primarily designing the form of the Claim lodgement flow. Similar to week 3, adjustments were made to the design to accommodate the feedback from testing and further development of the brand and visual design, this was done by Tim, while I focused on designing the claim flow. Tim and myself sat down for 5 minutes and sketched out an initial quick idea for the first and second page, we ran each other through our designs, discussed pros and cons of each within another 5 and repeated that twice more. This left us with a strong design direction we were both happy with, from which I began developing the screens in the flow further, in sketch form. I ran these designs across the internal team, gathering a quick round of feedback and began building the screens. The week followed a similar process to the previous weeks; wider client team check-in mid week and prototyping. By this point in the project we were able to test a complete product, from start to finish, which was very cool and beneficial in testing.
Delivery - The delivery week followed the Sprints. We compiled the design work we had done thus far and made any updates based on the last round of testing. The visual design was finalised and any requirements for the developers were made. As a final piece of work for the project, Tim and myself designed a website landing page for the app. I looked around at different product,landing page sites for apps for reference and broke down what I thought they were doing well, and what wasn’t working so well. I ran through these with Tim and we discussed our approach. We roughed out a page flow design on a whiteboard, gathered feedback from the rest of the internal team, made adjustments and Tim took it from there for a final design.
Results
The client took our designs from 4 weeks worth of design work and turned it into a completed product. After taking it internally their design team developed the brand further and translated the app flow into a format appropriate for Web.
What worked well
- A product owner who attended every meeting and was able to quickly come to decision, this meant no hold ups, deferring questions or necessary decisions to another manager, or another stakeholder who hadn’t attended the meetings.
- The development team was involved from the start, who were able to advise on the possibility of the designs working in development.
- An engaged client team that was eager to see the next designs and be involved in the design process. As they know their own product and market better than we do, they can spot and advise on business requirements quickly and effectively.
What didn’t work well
- Developing the visual design of the app during the Sprints. Though this was an internal decision we made to really push the design, it did mean that we had a few late nights ensuring we had all the necessary screens and states were ready and in the prototype for testing.