Liberty Mutual

Human-centered, data driven design

Role: Senior Product Designer

In 2017, I joined Liberty Mutual as a Senior Product Designer during a major digital transformation. At this time, the entire digital product organization was rebuilt from the ground up and all team’s embraced new ways of working using human-centered, data driven design. All team’s, including ours, used problem solving frameworks like Design Thinking and Lean UX to learn from customers, test new ideas, and create better experiences. Our team worked on the digital home insurance product and my role was to advocate for users and lead design in our product squad.

Challenge and goals

Business leadership’s goal was to generate more digital-only sales. This would result in more profitable transactions because the company would not have to pay their licensed insurance agents a percentage of sales in commision. They hypothesized that creating a better digital experience would increase digital-only conversion rates for a younger demographic. In addition to this, the in-market digital product was not performing to expectations. Conversion rates were lower than expected, the UI was not aligned with their new visual identity, and the experience was difficult to get through. It was our team’s mission to create a new experience that was better for users and the business.

Research, data, and empathy

Prior to our team kicking off any work, we had the opportunity to spend a full month entirely focused on learning and empathizing with customers through extensive research. We listened to many hours of live customer interviews and learned from subject matter experts that could help our team understand the various aspects of the product. These included experts from: underwriting, actuarial, legal, data science, and business. During this time, our team became fully immersed in the problem space and captured a substantial amount of qualitative and quantitative data that we used as the basis for all of the work we created.

Synthesizing learnings

After conducting all of this research, our team began to synthesize learnings. We worked together to create journey maps, empathy maps, how might we’s, stakeholder maps, and built personas. We also began framing the key problems, documenting assumptions, and created hypotheses to test. One of our most important findings was that paradoxically, though younger customers were the most comfortable purchasing products online, they were also the most likely customers that would need guidance from a licensed insurance agent due to their inexperience and seriousness of the purchase.

Design and Prototyping

My role as Senior Product Designer was to lead the design of Liberty's digital home insurance product. We had two mandates: 1) To design the next generation digital home insurance product using human-centered design methods. 2) Improve the in-market experience to drive higher conversion rates using user research, data analytics, and testing.

We spent most of our time focused on designing a new digital product because we learned that the current user experience was far from ideal, not performing well, and because new entrants threatened to disrupt the industry with new innovative offerings.

You'll notice that we did not apply brand colors to the prototype at this stage. This was an intentional decision by our team. At this time, the very vibrant yellow and patina teal colors were new and there was a lot of debate about how and where they should be used (especially around accessibility). Avoiding getting embroiled in this topic at this stage, allowed our team to move faster.

Outcomes

During my time there, our team prototyped a new digital product that dramatically simplified the process, updated the UI to a modern look and feel, and addressed many user needs and desires. We continuously researched, prototyped, iterated, and tested new ideas. This eventually led to our team building a high-fidelity, functional prototype in React to test a near fully new and viable product experience. We brought customers back from our original month-long research to test our designs and our prototype tested extremely well. One of the funner quotes we got from one of our original research participant was:

“The design looks sleek and modern… it makes me feel this company has their shit together.”

Design System

In addition to my primary role at Liberty, I also contibuted to the design system in its earliest days. I built the first ever distributable Sketch library when libraries were a brand new feature in design tools, helped design the documentation website, recorded tutorials for how to use design systems in Sketch, and contibuted code.