Designing for the Differences, and Avoiding Delight
Part 3 of the Insurance Onboarding Series
Alright!
In this Insurance Onboarding Series, we’ve covered the basics of insurance in part 1 “ELI5; What is insurance?” and commiserated with the compounding insurance confusion of Joe Schmoe, our average American interacting with different kinds of insurance products across his lifetime.
Today, we’re going to move into the broad product and design implications of what we’ve learned so far.
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When you imagine the average American’s lifetime, they encounter increasingly complex and unintuitive insurance products. What might start with just smartphone coverage or cheap renters insurance quickly becomes high stakes health insurance purchases, life insurance, disability coverage, and more. It’s clear why folks procrastinate around insurance-related decisions, and generally avoid working in the industry.
The latest thinking in psychology tells us that procrastination is less about poor time management and more about avoiding the way a task makes you feel.
When I was a kid, health insurance made me feel afraid that my disabled little sister wouldn’t be able to get the medical care she needed. As an adult, I’ve felt uniformed, overwhelmed and confused by insurance industry jargon, and worried I’m going to make an important mistake when choosing coverage.
That’s a big negative-emotion mountain to climb for any designer or product person getting involved in insurance, let alone the customers of the products they build. But I’ve learned a few things about this mountain over the last 7 years, and think I can help it at least feel more like a hill.
Deal with the customer’s emotional baggage
If the last insurance experience you had made you feel shitty, then it’s reasonable for you to assume the next one might too.
Designers are taught to design for “delight,” but I’ve learned that feels steadily more inauthentic as you grow older and encounter more expensive, serious insurance decisions.
For example, when you’re 23 years old and spending $5 a month on basic renters coverage from Lemonade, a hot pink product with cartoon drawings of dragons and heavy use of illustrations feels authentically delightful, approachable, and fun. But when you’re 33 years old, trying to get pregnant, and choosing health insurance through your new employer during a short open enrollment window, designing a cheerful or amusing product seems phony and childish.
What the insurance customer is craving isn’t delight, but a direct offset to those negative emotions they are bringing to your door. Aim to design insurance products that make your customer feel informed, in control, and consistently aware of how they can get help.
Just informed, not educated
Now before you think, “Ok, I’ll add tutorials and links to deep-dive insurance content in my product, lists of common questions and answers at the bottom of every page, and tooltips defining each insurance term! I’ll build cost calculators and risk estimates! Insurance dictionaries! Longform industry guides!” Hang tight. Consider what you sometimes do first, when you finally address the procrastinated task at hand; Do you over-research? Go into data gathering mode and collect as many facts as you can? Try to become an expert, thus procrastinating the task further?
Given the complexity and emotional baggage brought to insurance products, a designer’s goal should be to make their customer feel informed enough to make a decision, not given new ways to overthink and procrastinate this uncomfortable task.
Not “Here’s how insurance works” but “Here’s what you need to know,” “Here’s what comes next,” and “Here’s how you undo or adjust this decision, if you want to make a different choice later.”
And the last way to make a hill out of that mountain of negative emotions when designing an insurance product;
Recency bias & expectation management
Let’s go back to our story about Joe Schmoe from the second post in this series; when he got into a fender bender, he gave the police officer his flimsy car insurance card, filed a claim, and later saw the cost of his insurance go up. A year later when Joe bought renters insurance, he never got an insurance card. And when his bike was stolen off his porch, he second guessed whether it was worth filing a claim. Would the monthly cost of his renters insurance just go up? Would he need proof of insurance to show the police officer when he filed a report about the stolen bike?
Insurance purchases are infrequent, and a customer might only use their insurance a couple times a year. That means two things; (1) they have fewer opportunities to make sense of the space, and sometimes forget what they learned before they interact with insurance again and (2) they might anchor on what they just learned in their most recent insurance experience, bringing false expectations to your product.
When you’re designing products in the insurance space, it’s important to understand what your customer’s most recent insurance experience might have been, and directly address any differences upfront.
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To help with that challenge, I’ve created a table in FigJam (a whiteboarding tool from Figma, a product designers use) outlining how those key, customer-facing touchpoints of insurance - applications, quotes, policies, and claims - behave across kinds of insurance, organized in the chronological order a person might encounter products.
Here’s the link: FigJam: How Different Kinds of Insurance are Different, by Carrie Phillips
Consider which kind of insurance you think you understand best, or the one you most recently interacted with. Read through that row, and then note how it’s different than the products you may encounter next. Check out the purple boxes, and try to answer questions, fill in gaps, and add what you’ve learned.
This will help us all gather a broader understanding of the insurance industry, and, should you choose to get involved, design products that address your customer’s emotions, cut through their procrastination, and help them make decisions they feel good about, faster.
Next post coming soon!
Carrie
On to the next post!
