Research-Validated Redesign in Crop Insurance
Overview
- Enterprise crop insurance organization
- Brought into an ambiguous in-flight project
- Conducted research to validate assumptions and discover more about the target user and journey
- Iteratively refined solution ideas, pivoting as needed
- Redesigned a core workflow experience
- Collaborative multi-disciplinary effort
Outcomes
- Championed informed decision-making with insights from user research and usability tests
- Saved time and headaches by pivoting away from invalidated assumptions
- Improved team alignment around goals and strategy
- Put into practice the org’s new design system
- Enabled the team to deliver value to users on time in a first-time-in-a-long-time win for the organization
Context – Find My Bearings and Hit the Ground Running
Working with a client in the crop insurance industry, I joined an in-flight project to help a team validate their solution ideas before they continued. This team of stakeholders had been working on the project for a couple of months already and felt like they had bitten off more than they could chew.
I started with stakeholder sessions to get up to speed on where the team was at and their next steps in order to devise the best research plan I could. In the effort to identify the target users, goals of the project, and the “why” behind their solution and the problems it sought to fix, we realized that ambiguity and assumptions underpinned a lot of the decisions so far.
Goal – Build the Right Thing, and Build the Thing Right
Help the team improve a core workflow of their product by delivering a more performant and streamlined experience. To do so, my aim was to clarify strategy, validate our ideas, and iteratively refine designs alongside stakeholders, developers, and users.
Scope and Activities
- Discovery sessions to understand the primary journeys and the pain that they were targeting with their solutions
- Planned and facilitated user interviews to gather qualitative insights from one user type (crop insurance agents)
- Planned a survey to gather broader insights from another user type (policyholders/farmers)
- Synthesized research results to distill and share findings
- Collaborated with another designer, stakeholders, and the product team to invert their assumed mental model
- Created and refined designs to support the new mental model and leveraged the org’s nascent design system
- Conducted usability tests down the line to validate the direction of the new solution
Conclusion – Informed Decision Making Makes for Better Decisions
The team was well-intentioned and motivated, but struggled to find the right direction for their efforts. Once we had clarified murky assumptions and garnered buy-in from both stakeholders and users for the new mental model, the team could see the light at the end of the tunnel. A sound design process led the way to not only understanding users and informed decision-making, it enabled the team to deliver a valuable improvement to users on time and get a win for their fledgling product practice.
Key lessons learned and experience gained include:
- How to immerse myself in a complicated, ambiguous project and quickly find true north
- How to leverage a user-centered process in order to validate ideas and gain buy-in with stakeholders
- How to iterate on designs through multiple touchpoints of user and stakeholder validation through the project cycle
