Insurance Agent Interview Guide

CoverHound Insurance Agents shop for quotes for small business owners based on what they know about their business’s risks and needs. They use this Interview Guide to collect information and upload it to an internal database for the company to keep track of. As design lead, I identified areas of success and opportunity for this tool to be integrated into the agent’s current platform.

Initial Research

Curious about the current use cases of the intake form (Interview Guide) in addition to the sales funnel, we performed a contextual inquiry with 5 of our commercial insurance agents of varying experience levels.

Here’s what the original Interview Guide looked like:

Here’s what we identified as the common user flow:

Key Takeaways:

• Cumbersome process to collect information

• Lack of source of truth

• No place to put random comments + information due to limitations of the “current” solution

Narrowing Scope

We wanted to make sure critical features made the cut:

• Simplify the experience

• Single source of truth

• Source for notes

Design & Iteration

Addressing the needs of both the agents (easily capture customer information) and business (track customers in the sales process for compliance) - we evaluated all crucial user flows and reduced the 10-step process down to these 3 simple steps:

We also performed a brainstorm with our project team to get as many ideas out there from different perspectives:

When the team felt comfortable about a direction, I mocked up a few low-fidelity prototypes to test.

Usability Test #1

Using a clickable prototype, we ran a moderated-remote test + mini-interview with 6 agents.

Goal: Surface any usability issues with this MVP at a high-level (implementation, location, & functionality of script & notes)

What worked?

• 6/6 found this prototype easier to use

Opportunities?

• Unclear how to access Notes section

• Locating questions was difficult for agents at a quick scan

• Find a trigger point for this feature that is inline with their natural flow of work

Refine Designs

I re-grouped with our PM on which enhancements were most important based on agent and business needs:

Usability Testing #2

There is only so much feedback you can get through a limited, clickable prototype so we worked with our engineer to develop a lightweight MVP version for test purposes. We felt this was a better way to gauge user flows.

Key Takeaways:

• Section headers are helpful for agents who need to bounce from topic to topic

• We also noticed a few bugs and addressed that in the final deliverables

Additional Considerations

A few more business needs were added before the final deliverable:

• Space to represent brands

  • Our agents work with multiple partners and have to act as an agent from a partner brand

• Add a page for Recommended Carriers

  • Agents don’t always do the shopping so we needed to include a space where agents can ask their assistants to shop quotes for them

Design System

In considering the visual design of the final feature, I evaluated the current agent platformed and noticed inconsistencies. In efforts to bring consistency to the app, I created this design system considering common components.

Final Product

This product was shipped to our agent flow and is still a feature currently being used by our agents. Overall, leadership and agents were pleased with this implementation but there’s always room for improvement!

Next Steps

1. Evaluate the usability of the Interview Guide

2. Build a robust “Next Steps” page

Reflection

There were some challenges that we had to overcome that will help us in future projects:

Next: Making Design Components Searchable →