Insurance Website Redesign
Bringing an old insurance website into the future with a comprehensive redesign and rebranding.
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Client
Industry
Year
A new website and brand. All at once.
Highly regarded northeastern Ohio insurance company Westfield Insurance wanted to redesign their website and brand. The company had always had the same rustic, old-world branding and needed a refresh. I was on a team that was tasked to design the website in six months.
A new website. In record time.
The task was to complete all research, design and development in 6 months. The old site was not extremely salvageable so each screen needed to be designed from the ground up on a short timeline.
Starting fresh. One design at a time.
The team split up and handled design, wireframes, information architecture and all functionality. The approach was to work quickly and try to validate concepts with users whenever possible.
Senior UX. Resident goofball.
My role on this project was Senior UX on a team of 6. I was predominantly working on wireframes with a heavy focus on interaction design. I was also responsible for interactive insurance tools and partnered with another UX designer on those. We also collaborated to create a design system for the new website.
Wireframes, Prototypes, Design system, User research
UX strategy, team LEAD, interaction design
Your Vision, Our Expertise
Discovering customer needs.
For discovery, the UX team conducted user research with internal teams and external customers, completed heuristic evaluations, card sorts and a competitive analysis to get a firm understanding of user needs.
Usability Evaluation. Reviewed the old Westfield site and surfaced over 50 usability issues. I wrote a detailed heuristic evaluation report and shared it with stakeholders. We used this information to as design tenets for improving the experience.
User Research. Talked with 10 internal and 10 external website users to understand opportunities, pain points and how we could help to improve it. This was tricky because the previous site was hardly used by anyone.
Competitive Analysis. Reviewed 20+ competitor sites and put together a report with the basic design patterns so our team could understand best practices within the insurance industry
Summary of Findings
The old Westfield website was very much a placeholder. As we really began to dive in we realized that we would need to redesign it from the ground up. The issues below are areas we specifically focused on cleaning up during the redesign.
No Self Service
Outdated Website
Usability Issues
Navigation Issues
Wireframes, protoypes, iteration.
The design strategy was to create a living, fully-functional prototype of the entire site. This worked very well since each page had specific requirements and scenarios that needed prototyped. We did two rounds of usability testing during design. As things were finalized, we worked from low to high fidelity to generate the UI and the Design System for the new website.
Six intense months later Westfield Insurance had a lovely new site.
The project itself was tough but yielded a beautifully designed website and brand. The scope of what we were able to accomplish in a short time was surprising. The site had a new design, new content and new tools available on launch - see Design Solutions for more.
Insurance Product Pages
A big win for this project was designing informative and helpful product pages for each type of insurance. Each of these 'hubs' contains detailed information about the benefits of each product and allows the user to easily contact an agent.
New Branding
The UX team was heavily involved in the rebranding efforts for the new site. After some iteration the red-hued, friendly branding was implemented and fully replaced Westfield's older branding throughout all sites and brick-and-mortar locations.
Simplified Navigation
The UX team optimized the navigation and information architecture. The new design allowed for the complexities of insurance while also providing visual affordance to clarify any additional subcategories through text or icons.
Interactive Tools
In addition to the website design we were tasked with adding some insurance tools to the mix. The purpose of these is to ensure users can get access to agents, quotes and other information via interactive interfaces which we designed and built into the site.
Westfield has come to the future.
The new website was immediately well-received both internally by our stakeholders and externally from people using the site. The new brand offered a fresh take on Westfield and gave users a breadth of functionality, information and interactive tools.
34% Reduction in bounce rate after the site went live.
23% Faster ability to find an Agent will the new tools.
+3 min Average site duration after going live
62% Increase in all site events post-launch.
