Policybazaar App revamp

A designer’s initiative to restructure the overall information architecture and create a user-centric experience on the app.

Team: Design (Self), Product Owner, Business Head for app, Analytics team.

Overview

Policybazaar is here to transform insurance and financial services. Today Policybazaar is a market leader and built the protection industry in India. To serve our customer best, we are trying to give the best insurance buying experience.

Policybazaar was the first web aggregator in India to establish a business model where user can explore insurance products from different insurers, compare them and make a decision to buy on our website or app.

Brief

PB website (mobile & web) has been the prime focus for business as it generates maximum footfall and revenue for the organization. While PB app is just there to support the current business model and has almost no impact on the revenue.

It does allow the users to buy insurance and to manage policies on the go, but all the buying journey is built with web-view support which has their own pro & cons. Now leadership wants to

Re-build the app to create one more revenue channel and brings profitability to the organisation while keeping pleasurable insurance-buying experience.

OKR (Objectives and Key Results)

Since the goal was clear, we had to find out key results that will help us achieve our objective. After multiple brainstorming session with Product, Marketing, Technology and Analytics team, we were able to define the OKR for overall project.

Objective :

To engage more user on the app and drive revenue while keeping pleasurable insurance-buying experience.

Key Results:

• Onboard new users on the app.
• Retain users so they can spend again with us.
• Drive conversion for less selling products.

Design Process

Step 1. Empathize & Define— Understand user’s need and problems

Started with empathy phase where I tried to understand the requirement in detail and find out about users, their emotions, context and condition of the usage.

• How does insurance buying works in general?
• Who are the target user?
• Why is this app required/important?
• What are the emotions they experience while using current product?
• How does this app benefits customers differently compared to other PB platform?
• What we can solve for user differently on the app vs desktop?
• When and where (context & conditions) this app will be used?

Let’s find out the answers.

How insurance buying works in general?

I started with competitive research to understand a typical user journey of buying and managing insurance products across digital platforms.

image 1 — typical user journey of insurance buying

Almost every platform/provider uses the similar journey as mentioned above (image 1)

They collect user’s contact information in very first step and then land them on the product listings. Product listing page allow user to filter out offering as per their need and compare between multiple offerings.

Why collect contact info on first page rather collecting user requirement?This helps businesses to reach to customers incase they drop-off from journey or to assist them buying product if they are not able to make a decision. Although, quality/authenticity of the leads is another problem statement, which we tried to solve separately.

Who are the Users and their needs.

Next step was to understand people I am designing for and to gain insights into what they need, what they want, how they behave, feel, and think, and why they demonstrate such behaviors, feelings, and thoughts when interacting with insurance providers.

I started with Qualitative research which I later validated with the existing quantitative data from our website users. This helped me create un-biased opinion with the users.

I invited 15 extreme users and 15 main stream users in separate groups for the interview, to explore:

1. Website usage pattern.
2. A typical user journey of buying and managing insurance products.
3. Frustrations & Joy related to their overall experience.
4. Possibility for an on the go solution (app).

Defining User segment

I used analytics tool to validate the interview results with the existing data from our website and the app. I discovered four basic attributes of the users based on the need and their usage pattern, which later helped me define primary user group for the app.

image 2 — User segmentation

Though it could have been more detailed segmentation, we decided to go with it for the first phase.

1. PB User: Users who have interacted and brought from Policybazaar.
2. Potential PB User: Users who are have never brought from Policybazaar or a first time user.

What emotions do they experience?

img 3 — Empathy map

I found out that users have many questions, frustrations and feedbacks related to after-sale service, claims, support etc. Some of the generic feedbacks were:

• Insurance products are too complicated to understand? Help me make an informed decision on products I want to buy.
• App landing page is too complicated to understand. I have to do multiple clicks to get to my purchased policy.
• Why do I have to provide my personal details every-time I try to buy insurance?
• How can I easily check what is covered and not covered in my policy?
• How do I claim my policy? What is required to make a claim? What should I do in emergency cases?
• I have question related to my policy. Who should I ask?
• Status on policy or query resolution is not clear.

Why is this app required?

Insurance is a product with annual validity. People buy insurance and then forget about it unless claim or renewal of policy is required. They don’t have to interact with insurers in-between. Then, why would they keep the app. I found out some interesting answers from users and business stakeholders.

• They wanted to keep all their policies at one place. So they can access it easily and whenever required.
• People tend to miss the last date of renewal as they are not properly informed about it or been notified on time.
• In certain cases, desktop may not be the best solution to access. So mobile helps.

Summarising overall findings

After observation and analysis of key takeaways from the research. I tried to define problem statements, which we have to solve now in this phase or later:

• Users want to use the app if it can help them make an informed decision across products and help them understand nuances of insurance coverage.
• Users will keep the app if they get value out of it such as easy access to policy, notifications for important actions etc.
• Help users raise the query and get quick resolutions without calling the customer care centre. This will also benefits business in terms of minimizing operations cost.
• Once insurance is bought, user needs to understand claim process and if required can initiate a claim easily and quickly.

Step 4. Ideation & Recommendation

I started to ideate solutions which can bring user-centricity on the app while we achieve our business goal as well.

To make it more user friendly, I devised a strategy to re-look the app architecture for our user segments.

• New architecture should solve the problems around “How theses segments behave” and “what they want” across “insurance buying lifecycle”

image 4 — insurance sale and after sales lifecycle

• This will also help users make an informed decision about purchase as they will have access to after-sales processes.
• Create a policy dashboard for PB Users for easy access to their purchased policies and can start a claim against it without any hassle.
• Revamp the content (language) in journeys so it help educate users about difficult nuances.
• Build native experience across the product for app. So user doesn’t have to provide personal information everytime they try to buy something.
• For first time users included walkthrough screens which tells what to expect inside the app.
• Capture user’s data from the journey and build user’s profile to facilitate a personalized experience. Personal details, Family details, Vehicle details, assets details etc will help us recommend quotes that users are more likely to buy. This will also help us share timely updates and alerts with users.
• Notify users about their policy and its status, different new products based on their profile at regular intervals. This will help user renew the expired plans and retain with us.
• Allow users to re-start the journey, from where he left last time.
• Real time query resolution on the app. This will minimize the risk of drop-offs. Ask customer care teams to promote app for quick query resolution and status check.
• A pleasurable and personalised experience for the respective user groups.

Design Solution

New information architecture — New app architecture revolves around basic requirement of Insurance purchase. This should enable users with an instant access to their goal and ease the task completion process.

Non-PB users get to explore all part of the app be it Products, Claims, Help or Profile section except Policies section. They can also raise a query if they have any. Once someone converts into a PB user they get an additional navigation to a dashboard (Policies), where they can manage their policies and perform tasks related to it.

Navigation — Designed a new dynamic navigation which add new options based on user segment. For user with ongoing insurance with PB, Policy dashboard gets added to navigation which enable user a easy access to his policies.

Break down the components to design better landing page — I’ve re-designed the elements with more relative data points and logical positioning.

New App Screenshots

We conducted user testing sessions as well as we used online tools (Maze) to gather feedback on new designs. After 2–3 iterations based on feddbacks we were able to close this design.

Overall impact of the new design

(Based on 3 months data)

• Onboarding — minimised drop-offs from onboarding/login steps.
• User retention — 18% reduction in people un-installing the app. 34% of total queries are online now and 22% are getting solved on app.
• Conversion — 18% increased conversion on app.

We are trying to build an experience where user understand the insurance and can easily make a decision for purchase.

This concludes the strategy and execution of PB app re-vamp.

Thank you :)