The team at Soteris, a "Turbotax for insurance", was looking for a prototype that would help them identify customer needs, demonstrate their core product offerings and acquire potential customers. This brief discusses the process of how I designed and tested a pitch-ready prototype for their customers.
Designer
April 2021
1 designer, 1 product lead
User Research
Wireframing
UX design
UI design
Prototyping
Soteris is SaaS company that is working to bring the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the insurance industry. I worked alongside the product lead to create a prototype that they could show to potential customers and test their product offering.
Soteris' user are used to physical or PDF forms. Much of their day is spent in front of physical or PDF forms where they process lengthy ACORD forms, a system of standardized insurance documents created by the ACORD org. Since these insurance agents have likely used the same methods and tools for years, our challenge was to design a platform that felt both approachable and empowering for skeptical tech users.
how insurance agents process applications
I laid out a user flow diagram upon reviewing the wireframes. Since the end prototype would simultaneously test and pitch insurance agents, we ensured the flow would detail both the agent customer and the insurance agent flow.
There were 3 main buckets of applicant information that insurance agents needed to review: business info, underwriting information, and billing information. However, the insurance application process is quite a lengthy one so we split initial sections of information into 4 steps: Business Information, Policy information, Underwriting Information, and ACORD Review (ACORD is a separate software insurance agents use to review their forms).
Since we were starting completely from scratch and the user flow was primarily for user testing/pitching, we picked a simple step-based UI framework that added the least amount of complexity.
Soteris auto-fills a number of input fields by scraping information found online so it was important for us to demonstrate that the fields were both easy to read and easily edited if necessary. We accomplished this by creating additional edit screens for sections of information such as "client details" or "business information".
Adjusting to new software can be an unsettling experience, especially for users who don't trust new technology. To conclude the experience, we added a confirmation screen that allows agents to review the filled out ACORD form (current industry form) auto completed by Soteris.
This prototype was used for testing the value proposition of Soteris' new product with insurance agents. With the positive feedback received through this customer development process, Soteris has decided to develop an MVP of this product.