Product Design
Insurance Claims

PROBLEM STATEMENT
One of Spot’s main offerings is Pass Protection, which allow purchasers of big-ticket items like ski passes to get a percentage of the purchase back if they find they can no longer use the pass.
The initial claims experience was temporarily based on a generic claim PDF a filer would download and fill out, but the generality and non-digital nature of this process meant a poor experience for both users that needed to file a pass claim, and internal users managing those claims.
The objectives of this project were to digitize the Pass Protection claim experience so that claimants could file a claim within their Spot account, and internal administrators could review the claims and make a verification ruling before sending the complete claim packet on to our claim adjudication partner.
APPROACH

Project Pitch and Planning

User Research and Requirements Review

Competitive Analysis and Defining Principles

Process Mapping, Information Architecture, and User Journeys

Wireframing and Prototyping

Copywriting and Review Process

Engineering Collaboration, and Supporting the Build and Launch

Usability Testing & Assessing Design Impact
Discovery
USER RESEARCH AND
UNDERSTANDING CURRENT PROCESS
Discovery for the project started with a review of our personas at Spot, and filling in specific gaps in our understanding related to how our customers thought and felt about Pass Protection.
We uncovered when speaking with prior filers of Pass Protection that there were misunderstandings in how they thought Pass Protection would work when they purchased the product, and that there was a roller coaster of emotions most filers felt when they needed to actually use the Pass Protection product.
Most filers file because of a negative life reason, and then there are all these complicated insurance hoops to jump through which just adds to users’ frustrations.
In addition to gathering our customer’s context, we also talked to our internal Claim Advocates to understand more about their existing process of how they process Pass Protection claims. We did some shadowing/workshopping with them to really understand what it is they’re looking for when processing a claim.
- Do Perosnas
- Do Sentiment journey
- Do User Interviews
!! Include Collaborative Team Section
- Qual: ___
// Internal understaninfn differences with existing products
/ Actual hard reqs avout verification , How want to position Spot?
Discovery w/ Customer Advocates to understand how claims are currently being managed - =====
- !! Do Visuals Personas and Research
- Informs user journey mapping and current state process mapping
- Gather business and insurance requirements from IMG for Insurance & Refund Plan claims
- Informs documentation and review for alignment
- Collaborative exercise to show how the process should work, taking into account all claims use cases
- Will visually communicate all features, people, processes, and tech involved
- Determine required features for both the Claim Admin and My Account tools
- Review all required features / flows for stakeholder alignment
- Visual of features and user stories required to deliver the new Pass Claims experience
- Collaborative effort between Product, UX, and Engineering to write and prioritize stories


Main Findings from User Experiences

Discovery with Customer Advocates to Understand Current Process

REQUIREMENTS AND MATERIALS REVIEW
For a list of project requirements, the PMs had already started gathering an initial list of requirements with stakeholders into a centralized Project Requirements Document.
We then reviewed this list, formulated additional questions, sought to understand why specific requirements existed from our stakeholders, and had some further requirement discussions. The Project Requirements Document was a living and evolving document throughout the design process.
Along with project requirements, we also took a deep dive into the materials and data we had available to work with.
For this project, we had a set of data elements we knew we would receive from enrollment of new Pass Protection purchasers, and we knew from our insurance carrier partner what documents they typically requested during claim filing in order to adjudicate on a claim.
One big question we sought to answer by looking into the data was the breakdown of how many purchasers and claim filers filed claims as groups of people (as in a family filing a claim together), verses individuals filing a single claim.
- Informs user journey mapping and current state process mapping
- Gather business and insurance requirements from IMG for Insurance & Refund Plan claims
- Informs documentation and review for alignment
- Collaborative exercise to show how the process should work, taking into account all claims use cases
- Will visually communicate all features, people, processes, and tech involved
- Determine required features for both the Claim Admin and My Account tools
- Review all required features / flows for stakeholder alignment
- Visual of features and user stories required to deliver the new Pass Claims experience
- Collaborative effort between Product, UX, and Engineering to write and prioritize stories

Business Requirements

Materials Review
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Concurrently with other discovery activities, we were looking around for other comparable experiences to how the Pass Protection claims process might work. We captured examples, flows, and made notes of how others had solved similar presentational challenges in dashboards and flows.
Because of the emotional ride most users are in when they come to file a claim, we took particular note of tone, language, and how others had sought to simplify and guide users through such a complex process.

Carrier’s Insurance Dashboard

Hopper & Spirit Airlines Cancellation Process
DISCOVERY SYNTHESIS & PRINCIPLES
To internalize a lot of the insights we gained from discovery, and help turn these insights into guiding lights for our ideation and designs, we went about forming a few key design principles.
A lot of these principles were formed in response to the understanding gaps and emotional distress most filers felt when coming to file a claim. We wanted any design we came up with to be simple and clear, have help always available, and to position ourselves as advocates for the filers each step of the way.
Design principles like these are great for socialization with project stakeholders, and can serve to get teams aligned on what a good solution will look and feel like.

Wireframing & Prototyping
WIREFRAMING & SCREEN DESIGN
Having done a lot of the planning up front, when we got into wireframing we already knew what information would need to be presented throughout the flow.
Wireframing the customer facing screens was mostly about deciding visually how best to present this information, and leading the claim filer through the flow in a comfortable, well communicated way.
A lot of consideration went into how to help users understand what information they needed to provide, while keeping the screens as minimal and digestible as possible. We used contextual nudges where we could, conditionals question sets within screens, and a lot of iteration and emphasis was placed on the screen copy and microcopy to communicate clearly.
For the project we needed to consider both the customer facing, and management aspects of the claim flow. As we were working through the customer facing flow and dashboard, we were also wireframing how to best display their claim info on our claim administration dashboard for internal verification of claims.
Collabarive /

Standardizing Insurance Coverage Cards

Displaying Case and Claim Info for Internal Claim Admins

Wireframing the Customer Facing Claim Flow
UI DESIGN & THE CUSTOMER’S CLAIM DASHBOARD
UI design and the detailed work of how to covey important information and affordances is often a very iterative process with improvements being designed and added over time. It’s about using visual hierarchy and the right UI elements to convey specific information in an ordered way to the user.
In this example, the customer’s claim dashboard, we designed this with a lot of the customer’s insights and uncertainties we heard from the discovery process in mind.
Filers were unsure about timelines and deadlines, so we added a ‘complete claim filing by’ date. Filers were unsure about what documents they needed to provide, so we added a specific link call out for this.
You can also see in these designs we were considering different ways to present if a group of people all filed together how might that look.

Iteration 1

Iteration 2

Iteration 3

Iteration 4
USING THE SPOT DESIGN SYSTEM
At Spot we maintained a Figma design system which made wireframeing and screen design constant, quick, and relatively easy to change around and work with.
I’ve written more about our work developing and maintaining the Spot Design System in my writeup on the UX Overview and My Role at Spot.




UX COPYWRITING & REVIEW PROCESS
Tone to calm, educate, keep simple, Direct
_____
Facutally Correct
Highly Precise
Compliant
Descriptive to take actions
Approachable and in brand voice.
Short is best.
Using – List of tone words

Copywriting Iteration and Notes

Copy needed to be precise and convey a lot of info

Copy needed to get the user to take complex actions
Usability Testing & Assessing Design Impact
USABILITY TESTING & DEFINING METRICS TO TRACK OVER TIME
Mind
_____

BUSINESS IMPACT & ASSESSING ORIGINAL GOALS
_____

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PROBLEM STATEMENT
Koverse is a Seattle based platform used to manage, normalize, and interpret large and complex data sets.
The original platform was built in 2012 with a focus on the extract, transform, load (ETL) process of combining and normalizing data.
Over the years as new features were added on to the platform, they had been added on in a siloed or piecemeal fashion. This made the tool work for one-off tasks but was not very effective for an end-to-end data processing workflow. Koverse was looking to remedy this.
APPROACH

Assessing the Tool to Redesign

User Research, Personas & Journeys

Competitive Analysis

Information Architecture

UI Concepts & Ideation

Wire-framing & Prototyping

Usability Testing

Development
User Research, Personas & Journeys
USER INTERVIEWS
Because none of us on the design team were data scientists ourselves, we needed to talk with data scientists to understand their mental models around processing data, and what workflows were more or less common to people in the processing stage.
We spoke with 18 people with job titles ranging from Data Analyst to Business Managers, and then sorted what they told us into common groupings using affinity diagram sorting.
PERSONAS & JOURNEYS
The affinity diagram sorting allowed us to group common responses into themes, and to see how the people with different job titles and roles all thought collectively about the data processing part of their jobs.
From these groupings of responses, and different workflows people had walked us through, we were able to assemble in depth personas for the different roles of people who would likely be interacting with this tool.
Brian – Data Scientist
Jean – Analyst
Yang – Systems Architect
Victor – Systems Administrator
Amina – IT / Business Manager
Information Architecture / Flow Diagramming
FLOW DIAGRAMS
Using our persona journeys and competitive analysis as guides, we set to work mapping out the workflows that would become the main paths the new tool would be designed around.
With a tool this complex, and solving for such a complex set of workflows, it was imperative to diagram out the functionality and the main goals the users would be trying to achieve before jumping into screen level design.

Wireframing & Prototyping
CONCEPTS & WIREFRAMING
We settled on a left rail menu paradigm that would keep context continuity throughout the tool, and a main workspace where the user could go step by step through the data processing workflow.
This series of screens shows the concept of a three-step wizard flow for importing data into the platform.
GOING DEEPER WITH COMPLEX TRANSFORMS
One of the big challenges with the Koverse interface is that the tool allows for transforms of the data (rules for how to systematically manipulate the data) to be chained together. These transforms could be selected from a list of common transforms, or written custom in Python.
With many data transforms in a row, the data flow becomes very complex to think about and control.
We did multiple rounds of sketching for the transform workflow, trying to make the experience intuitive and cut down on the vast cost of trial and error with large data sets. Here is one sketch and a Balsamiq wireframe exploring the interface we ultimately landed on for the design.
Development
TO CODE
Once the core elements of the design were wireframed, we went into a more ‘sketch to code’ phase where the prototype was being built in code and running with dummy data.
The prototype was built with Angular JS Material, and we tried not to stray too far from the default components for the sake of time and efficiency. Working this way allowed us to finish each sprint we were working on with fully functional code that Koverse could then use or test further.
As the design and prototype was being worked out and built, the visual designer on the team was working on a parallel path to style the interface from a component standpoint and provide a comprehensive style guide as trailing documentation.

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Partner iOS & Android App

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Starbucks Corporate approached the Mentor Creative Group looking to develop a mobile app that would enable their partners to engage with each other and the company on their personal device.
The Partner App is meant to provide a secure, easy to use platform for partners to schedule their work, stay up to date on Starbucks news, receive benefits information, and communicate with peers.
APPROACH

Assessing How Things Were Working

User Interviews

System Sentiment Analysis

Information Architecture

UI Concepts & Ideation

Wireframes & Prototyping

Prototype Usability Testing

Development
User Interviews
USER INTERVIEWS
Many of the requirements for the apps were pre-defined by Starbucks Corporate itself.
However to understand what parts of the current communication system were working well for people, and in what ways the apps could be designed to fit naturally into the barista’s work and communications flow, interviews proved very helpful.
The user interviews were conducted in two different Starbucks locations in Seattle, WA.
Research Materials
The User Interview Scripts and Key Takeaways
Information Architecture
DEFINING THE SCOPE OF THE APP
To capture all aspects of what information would be useful for the partners within the app and how all this information would relate to each other within the app, we began the design process by mapping out the information and the architecture of how the app would flow.

Wireframes & Prototyping
WIREFRAMING A FEW DIFFERENT CONCEPTS
We had a few different concepts for for how the screen level UI could work, and how the navigation could we worked in the apps to be intuitive for users to get from section to section.
Things like how far in advance on a calendar partners needed to be able to mark, and managers needed to plan for dictated how a calendar layout should work and function.
We we given access to a few Starbucks locations and to Starbucks Corporate Headquarters test kitchen to test a few different wireframe concepts and prototypes.

Development & QA
for Android & iOS Platforms
WORKING WITH THE STARBUCKS DEVELOPMENT TEAM
The apps were built in sections as parts of the designs were finalized so that the design and development phases of the project overlapped.
We worked with the internal Starbucks development teams to build the apps.
To do this, we produced detailed annotation documents outlining functionality, and visual elements. We would then meet with them regularly to review the development progress and provide QA as things were being developed.


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PROBLEM STATEMENT
Austin Eastciders is a hard cider beverage company in Austin, TX.
They wanted to produce something simple but fun that would be interactive on a mobile device to centerpiece a social media campaign and promote four new flavors of cider they were introducing.
APPROACH

Assessing The Context of the Project

Assessing The Market Audience & Brand Feel

Story Planning

Game Concepting

Screen Level Design Ideation

Wireframes & Prototyping

Marketing / Social Covers

To Code
Assessing The Market Audience
& Brand Feel
MEETING AUDIENCE WHERE THEY ARE
The marketing of Austin Eastciders is built around conveying a fun, social, summertime feeling.
We were very familiar with the brand after designing their website and online store, but when thinking about what kind of campaign we could run we began with re-examining the audience we would be targeting.
It was by kicking around ideas of what would appeal to the audience that we landed on the idea to produce a simple, interactive mobile game that could be easily promoted through a social media campaign.

Game Concepting
FLOW DIAGRAM & NARRATIVE MAPPING
With the general idea of the game in place that the user would need to interact with the ingredients to help ‘create’ the new ciders, the next stage was to figure out the mechanisms of how users would actually create the cider, and the challenges that would confront them.
We sketched different ideas and landed on an idea where the ingredients would float around the screen and the user would need to ‘tap’ on them to crush them into cider.
This fit multiple levels of what we were trying to accomplish – a coherant storyline, the depth of commitment by a user would not be too high, and the gameplay difficulty could be adjusted based on the speed of the ingredients floating around the screen that the user would need to tap.

Prototyping
PROTOTYPING THE HAPPY-PATH
From the wireframes, we worked with the visual designer and the existing Austin Eastciders brand elements to develop a simple prototype of how the game would look, function, and behave.
The prototype was built quickly and only designed around a single happy-path.
The purpose of prototyping this was was to make sure we captured key elements of the game narrative, got the behaviors of the interactive elements right, and also were able to discuss and get good feedback from all project stakeholders.

To Code
WORKING
B____
B____
B____
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