Project Overview

After the launch of a self-service claims portal for injuries and illness in AIG’s Singapore market, the team noticed a drop-off rate of more than 50% after the portal’s main landing page. AIG’s US-based leadership team also expressed concerns that the portal used complicated language and didn’t capture the company’s voice and tone.

Hypothesis

Both the client and Accenture team hypothesized that the high drop-off rates were potentially due to users’ lack of preparation and required documentation needed to complete the claims process.

Project Scope

The client wanted to avoid major back-end development changes. The project was scoped to implement front-end changes meant to address drop-off rates quickly while also building a long-term plan for larger improvements.

Our team completed a competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, user interviews, content restructuring, prototyping, and final design between September to November 2022.

The team

The Accenture design team consisted of an Interactive Project lead, UX researcher, UX designer, and myself (UX content designer). We partnered with AIG’s UX director, Digital Customer experience director, Singapore marketing director, and several stakeholders from AIG’s corporate leadership.

My role

• Conducting competitive research, a heuristics review, and user interviews with current policyholders

• Developing recommendations for improved content, accessibility, form design, and narrative structure

• Restructuring the content flow based on user feedback and UX recommendations

• Rewriting copy for all screens to be informative, empathetic, easy to understand, and true to AIG’s brand voice

Evaluating the Original Portal Experience

Competitive Analysis & Heuristics Evaluation

I led the competitive analysis effort, identifying six insurance competitors in the U.S. and Singapore markets to understand best practices and trends regarding form-based, transactional experiences in the industry.

The UX designer and I also completed independent evaluations of the current portal experience using Nielsen’s usability heuristics.

User Interviews

The team interviewed a claims agent and 10 Singaporean policyholders who recently completed a claim on the new portal. The interviews helped gauge sentiments toward the current claims submission process, friction & pain points, and whether the portal met their expectations.

Synthesis & Recommendations

We analyzed our findings from the initial research as a team. We synthesized our market analysis to identify a list of industry norms and organized a list of the most important design issues we found during the heuristics evaluation.

Main Recommendations

• Simplifying language and improving the content narrative

• Helping users prepare to complete their claim

• Implementing progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users with unnecessary fields

• Improving form design and implementing better UX design

After recommendations were presented to the client team, we got sign-off to move forward with redesigning the user experience to help reduce abandonment and encourage more digital claims processing.

Content Changes

Some of the major content changes in our final designs included:

Restructuring the experience

One of the biggest pain points policyholders cited was the length of the submission form and that they didn’t know if they could skip sections that didn’t apply to them. We wanted to try a progressive disclosure approach to avoid overwhelming customers and expedite their claims process. I also wanted to reorder the line of questioning so that it was a more natural, narrative form that users are more familiar with.

Rethinking tone, empathy, and word choice

To address AIG leadership’s concerns, I softened the tone throughout the flow so that it matched AIG’s brand voice. I added small moments of empathy while not being overly empathetic, as that can often be more off-putting to users.

Additionally, I reworked the language to reflect words used by the policyholders in our user interviews. For example, the original experience used terms like “policyholder,” “claimant,” and “insured” interchangeably. I chose to replace those terms with “policyholder” and “patient” to see if that could eliminate confusion, particularly in cases where the policyholder was filing a claim for another person.

Adding contextual help

In our initial presentation, we discussed leveraging tooltips to help guide users and give context where users needed it most. After restructuring the narrative, using a progressive disclosure model, and removing the confusing language, I determined that only two tooltips were necessary. The first tooltip was perhaps the most consequential: A hint directing users where to find their policy number from the landing page.

An improved landing page

We added a “Before You Start” section to the landing page to set user expectations up front. The new copy urges customers to have their doctor’s and hospital documents handy, along with a list of other documents they might need.

The new design also allows users to start a claim directly from the landing page. We’ve made it clear that the policy number isn’t required — one of the major pain points in our research — but that including the policy number can help process the claim faster.

Final Designs

Below is a walk-through of the final copy and designs for the claims portal.