As a member of the State Farm’s XD team, I was assigned to redesign the agent quoting experience for Homeowners (HO). This interface is currently a stand-alone enterprise application. While redesigning this, we were building this in a desktop and tablet view top fit inside the Saleforce application, so we can eventually sunset the application. The UI for the next experience needed to align with the newly redesigned products at State Farm using what is referred to as the 1x Library.
Responsibilities
My role in this project was to work with the HO project team to discover their project objectives, analyze the current experience and align the redesign with the other quoting products within State Farm. While acting in this role, I evaluated the architecture of screens, diagram the workflow, create high-fidelity designs and prototypes and collaborate with the research team to perform user testing.
Analysis of the current application
I started out listening to the HO team’s goals for the application and going through a couple of demonstrations of how a policy was submitted through the application. I started to evaluate the importance of the questions, potential pain points the agents experienced and the architecture of the screens.
The things I noticed was:
- The number of pop out screens to answer a question
- The large number of screens the agent could possibly view (90 total, I believe)
- Reports that the agent had to run
- Information that the agents had to enter as opposed to it automatically being pulled from existing State Farm data
- How the agent could miss questions that would cause errors when submitting for a quote
Next, I created a prototype of the current application by taking screenshots of all the screens. We used the prototype to explain the flow to others in the XD team and the upper level management. We also used the prototype to perform user testing to see how the agents used the application and discover the good and the bad. After reviewing those results, we could begin working on the redesign of the application.
Diving into the redesign
In beginning the redesign, as a team we reviewed current flow, the architecture, user feedback and business goals so I can begin laying out the experience.
The main goals we looked to incorporate:
- Consolidate screens
- Bring unnecessary pop out screens inline to answer questions
- Pre-populate all the questions, using common used answers, pulled data from State Farm records and third party reports
- Incorporate State Farm’s 1x Library to create an updated look that would drive agent excitement and usability
- Automatically run reports in the background, so the agent didn’t feel they need to review those reports by creating summaries
- Use any relevant information, research and business practices used in any recent similar products
When we first started this project, the ask was to build an end-to-end experience, but a couple months in the HO team pivoted to a partial experience. This partial experience which lets the development team build an experience quicker and release it to the agents. Then down the road the HO team would monitor how agents would respond to the new experience and iterate on that when building and sun-setting the full experience.
The scope is to take the agents to the quote results in the new experience, then if the customer wanted to purchase the policy the experience would “kickout” to the current experience. In this partial experience, the HO team would remove some questions (which was 4 or 5 questions) that they deemed not important to give a quote. These questions only needed answered if the agent would sell the policy. This cause several weeks of back and forth on what is the best experience for user.
The problems with this kickout, as currently presented from the HO team, was:
- It would land on the first screen of the current flow, we felt this would cause the agent to question if the information from the current experience was pulled in. That uncertainty would then cause the agent to feel the need to review and verify all the pages in the current experience.
- Next, at some point after the kickout, the agent would have to click a button to re-calculate the quote to get to a quote results screen. We felt this could confuse the user since in the new experience they already calculated the quote and saw those results.
- When the agent would click that button, they would see four errors appear because of removal of those questions in the new experience
- The XD team felt this frustrate and confuse the user
- Kicking out to the current and outdated experience would kill all the excitement of using this new experience.
- The XD team felt it could cause a lack of confidence in the capabilities if the new experience. This could cause the agent to just skip the new experience altogether and use the current experience instead since they would need up there anyways.
Testing
With this pivot, we need to evaluate how to validate our viewpoint to the HO team and test our redesign. We decided to first focus on the component that may require the most problems then incorporate that in the complete experience, along with kicking out to the current application to test our flow along with how the agents would react to seeing how that may work.
First, we merged the coverages, option endorsements and quote results screens into one interactive screen to see how the agent would respond and if they understood how that may work. We received positive feedback and a couple points to include on our next iteration.
After incorporating the testing feedback into our designs, we started working on a prototype of the partial mixed with the post-quoting part of the current experience. This would include how it would kickout to the current experience. In that prototype, we would show how the agent would finish the quote in the new experience, kickout to the current experience and show error messages from the removed questions as requested from the HO team.
Testing Results and Final Iteration
From this testing, we had minor revisions to the new experience. We were able to validate our thoughts through agent feedback and a visual facepalm from one agent when the saw the transition to the current experience. We did have some back and forth with HO team in getting them to understand and get onboard. As a team, we were able to collaborate and work on some solutions to make this easier and instill confidence to the agent. While no matter what, we have to kickout after getting a quote, we were able to improve that experience by collaboration between the XD team, HO team, underwriting and legal.
Some solutions included:
- In the current experience, pre-fill the removed questions to remove the errors
- Call out those removed questions with an informational screen before the kickout
- Also, we researched on how we can control where they landed in the current experience. The development team learned they can have them land directly on the quote results screen in the current experience.
While we still didn’t like this kickout experience for the agent, we felt these solutions would create the best results given the perimeters the HO team had with making the agent complete the policy in the current experience.
Right now in this process, we are reviewing the new experience with our content writers and once the development team.
Below is a video of the of the current prototype.