Usability testing to prioritize pain points before release
Digitizing historically analog processes to increase efficiency and reduce errors for insurance compliance professionals.
Assured Certificates
Assured Certificates is an online software company bringing together certificate holders and vendors onto one platform to streamline the process of requesting, issuing, and tracking certificates of insurance.
Role
Product Manager
Product Designer
Deliverables
Customer Research
Prioritized Backlog
Product Designs
Summary
Assured Certificates found an opportunity to digitize the process of issuing certificates of insurance. They mapped out a customer journey and built a complete user experience through prototyping and prioritizing product features. Their approach helped the team validate assumptions during development and align with stakeholders. The outcomes were faster idea iteration, an understandable experience for each customer type, and a unique value proposition.
Initial user flow for brokers which was later removed
The Challenge
An established insurance and compliance agency faced scaling limitations due to the inefficiencies of industry-wide analog processes. The company identified an opportunity to digitize standard processes and create a linked experience between clients and vendors– that allowed each customer-type to manage their needs within one platform. Before building the new product (and what would become a separate company), they needed to prototype, test, and validate their product ideas to build a prioritized backlog to begin development. Additionally, they needed a process for continuous testing and learning as they developed their new product to ensure they were delivering the highest value to customers.
Our Approach
We began with by mapping out the customer journey for each customer-type relative to their role within the insurance certificate process to identify the most ambiguous parts of their experience to begin prototyping some concepts to test.
Updated user flows based on customer research
With our tested prototypes and learnings, we were able to create a prioritized list of product features and data access requirements to help the development team build the data architecture and begin building a complete user experience.
Before launching, we ran additional testing sessions to help us prioritize any critical bugs and pain points that needed to be addressed before launching. This method of building and testing became the blueprint for the team to continuously validate assumptions during development and served an alignment tool between the development team and stakeholders to gather feedback, direction, and ensure we were all heading in the same direction from a product standpoint.
As we approached our initial internal release, we prioritized improvements to the system based on qualitative customer feedback, which guaranteed critical bugs and must-have user needs were addressed before launching.
"Maicol expertly lead us through four days of analysis, prototyping and user testing to refine our product and collect feedback on new design ideas. He helped us get the critical data we needed and translate user frustrations into useful features in order to take our product to the next level."
Ford Davis
Technical Director, Assured Certificates
Project focused dashboard to help users find delinquent certificates