Research and design to help streamline an insurance workflow

<p class="p-large" style="margin-bottom:80px;">The challenge was to design an intuitive mobile-first experience for Building Inspectors to use at on-site inspections. Pressed for time, and loaded with information, the</p>

Uncovering problems

We went through the current process with the EnsureFlow Product team and identified clear issues based on feedback from Building inspectors (BI’s).

Users – We found that new BI's find the current system difficult to learn and use when attending onsite inspections. This leads to inaccurate data entry and wasted time in corrections. It takes time to become a proficient user and understand the system.

Product – The process has defined steps but the UI is not intuitive or clear enough for BI’s on-site.

Interface – There is no clear starting point for a new user. The dashboard doesn’t visually show priority and the labelling is confusing.

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Possible challenges & solutions

From the interviews, we distilled the feedback to concentrate on three principles:

Simplify the process – The current process is unclear - it doesn’t feel linear. Reducing the interactions and chunking them into manageable actions would reduce cognitive load, allowing BI’s to capture the correct data while on-site.

Make it intuitive – Following a simplified process, the UI should be focused for mobile and tablet. It should visually prioritise next steps which would allow BI’s to intuitively enter all required data while on-site – reducing errors and saving time.

Save time – Make it easier to enter data by providing only contextual content for each step. Allowing the BI’s to access all content at any time reduces focus.

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Methods and Process

The experience was designed across three stages of workflow – Pre, Inspection and Post. These we carried through and fleshed out during each process.

An initial flow map was created to capture the current process in individual steps based on three stages in the inspection process – pre, during and post actions. When designing the proposed flow, one of the main aspects was to make actions mandatory before proceeding. This should aid in completion rates and reduce cognitive load on users not familiar with the system. The

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Content Wireframes

Once the flow was agreed upon, we expanded each story into detailed wireframe screens that showed indicative content and interactions. This allowed us to accurately define what the experience would feel like, and also surfaced possible technical limitations and considerations.

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Tappable prototype

A mobile prototype, displaying a higher fidelity and tappable transitions, was created for the User Testing sessions. This mimicked the prescribed flow and gave the user a sense of progress as they moved through each task.

The experience was designed across three stages of workflow – Pre, Inspection and Post. These we carried through and fleshed out during each process.

We invited six users that represented a general cross-section of digital aptitude, process knowledge and time employed with Construct Services. We conducted individual sessions where they were asked to complete three tasks based on the inspection workflow. We also applied a median scale of ease – 1(easy), 2 or 3(hard) – to give us a sense of how they progressed through interactions.

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Key findings

All users found the prototype to be intuitive and completed all tasks fairly easily. On average all users completed all tasks with ease, with only a couple finding both the photo upload and calendar input challenging.

One of the main issues was due to the prototype setup and flow around adding photos (hopefully made redundant with training and using their native device).

Most other comments were about the details required from the inputs provided and all mentioned that there were lots of repetitive data entry points.

Notifications needs thought - The ability to send auto notifications when on the way to a job would be valuable as BI’s need to make sure people are home. Same goes for any late cancellations from clients.

Prototype needed better labelling as BI’s were used to current content and vernacular. This hampered progress in some instances.

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Next Steps

Data cleansing Analyse and distil the necessary data needed to complete an inspection. It feels like there is a lot of repetition from legacy processes.

‍Style guide Start building a brand and component library for reference and consistency.

‍Build full interactive prototype In order to measure outcomes of this process, a prototype with cleaned data will need to be re-tested with users.

Design Sprints Set up design sprints for each major feature (or even bi-monthly mini-sprints to keep generating ideas).