Document Center

An easier way to access all insurance paperwork

To protect client confidentiality, I’ve changed some details of this project.

Creating an opportunity for design

Working with a design in-progress

When I first started working on the Document Center, I picked up a design that was well underway. My task was to assist the team through the rest of the design process: visual design, usability testing, and deployment.

I faced the following design challenges in the design I was continuing:

1. Each document has different legal rules on how long it is visible on the website
2. Backend systems only contained logic that related documents by how they were mailed to customers
3. The project team was resistant to using patterns from the rest of the website for their project

Testing out the design as could be built

I had a hypothesis during these conversations that there might be a few potential issues with the design – the organization of documents and if customers would have trouble accessing documents from their mobile device. I let the team know of my concerns, and I brought these potential issues up to the company’s usability team.

During usability test creation, the usability team worked with the business area to create scenarios for testing, but they also added in questions and scenarios that were aimed to also draw out information that would address my concerns. During each hour session (a total of 7 sessions), participants found it easy to find the page of documents on the website, but when asked to find documents related to their policy, they had a little bit more difficulty.

Example design used for usability testing at the company.

As participants said during each session:

1. I think of documents for my truck or documents for my house, not all auto documents
2. It’s also pretty tough to get to my documents on a phone – it’s not bringing up something when I tap on it

Bringing the team forward

Making the results of testing actionable

The team was let down by the results of testing – after all, they had spent over a year designing and building the experience, and it wasn’t received well for their customers.

Updated design includes product-centric organization and filters

I updated the design to help the team move forward with the results of testing:

1. The team can start to work on the logic of associating product documents together and powering filters
2. The design systems team can work on making touch targets larger for common design components
3. The new design can be tested again and shared with other areas of the company for awareness and testing again to show that this direction is valid

Even though the team had to deliver the experience was tested at the time, this design helped me to get more accustomed to some hard decisions that are in the real world: even if a design isn’t perfectly usable, having the functionality out there that can be quickly improved upon is also a valuable path forward for the team.