INSUREMONDO
Designing an app to easily photo-document your belongings when getting an insurance.
OVERVIEW
InsureMondo is the result of the User Interface Design Specialisation Capstone project from University of Minnesota on Coursera. The course offered five topics to base the project on:
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Topic 1: Photo document a collection of objects
Topic 2: Coordinating Cooperative Group Activities
Topic 3: Major Life Event Self-Planning
Topic 4: Personal informatics app.
Topic 5: App to Aid with Communal Domestic Responsibilities
We chose the first topic and our goal was to design a unified tool that allowed users to find and compare insurance companies, contact them directly, and photo-document user’s belongings as part of getting household insurance.
MY ROLE
I worked along with other two members of the course, and we coordinated the project remotely via Slack. As a team we all shared the user research, ideation, heuristic evaluation and user testing stages. Some specific tasks such as paper prototyping or recording a video demonstrating the prototype features, were carried out individually by my two colleagues while I developed the market research, user testing planning and later visual design.
Tools: Google Docs, Figma and GIMP
Timeline: Feb 2018 - Mar 2018
THE DESIGN PROCESS
User
Research
Ideation
Prototyping
Cognitive
Walkthrough
User
Testing
USER RESEARCH
The aim of this part of the capstone was to understand the challenges faced by our users and specific constraints that should guide our solutions; then, to use these findings to ideate and select the most promising solution to pursue with the prototype:
The main stakeholders were people who already had an insurance policy to have their personal belongings covered in case of damaged or lost, who had moved recently to another location and needed to document what they owned, and people who were renting their home fully furnished and wanted to have an inventory of all their furniture. However professionals in the insurance sector and anybody looking for an easy way to keep records of their personal items were also potential users.
Through the 8 interviews performed the following pain points were discovered:
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Spending too much time doing insurance research and looking for users references. The elevated cost when calling their central offices. The lack of transparency when asking for full policy coverage and conditions and the unclear process of providing a document with images of damaged items when having to make a claim.
The solutions proposed was: an easy, intuitive and complete tool to find insurance companies, sign up for the chosen policy and keep their insured belongings photo - documented and easily accessible.
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The design requirements stablished were:
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A guide or standardized, structured and intuitive process to do a photo-collection and document/categorize belongings
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Unified tool to create documentation and send images to the company
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Direct contact system with the insurer or assigned agent
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Clear comparison of different insurance in order to select the one that best fits customers’ needs stating evidently what’s covered in the insurance
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Flexible system to purchase insurance and select type of coverage according to needs
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Complete information about coverage and conditions of insurance
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Sense of confidentiality of the information provided to insurance company
IDEATION
In this phase, analysing the qualitative and quantitative data collected from the user research guided the generation of 100 design ideas for the project, then only the top five were selected.
Here are some of the ideas:
These were the top five ideas which covered the design requirements:
1 - App that enables users to find comparatives and reviews among insurance companies. It allows to take pictures of objects, create text descriptions, and to associate them to receipts. It also includes access to online stores to donate or sell unwanted items.
2 - Panorama view scan/ Laser gun scan/ Photography memory. Creating a laser gun that scans and takes pictures of objects, the laser has a large display enabling the selection of the items, the categorisation of it inserting kind, room, year of purchase, estimated value.
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3 - 3D House Virtual reality Create a 3D house version that can be used in different devices, where users can choose photos by drag and drop system, to place the items and tag them with cross-reference numbers to a list.
4 - Smart cashier. Customers can sign up for insurance directly in the stores for the objects just bought. In this way, barcode of the objects enable the exact identification of the object (manufacturer, serial number, ...) and the other relevant information (price, date of purchase, …) will be uploaded and added to insurance immediately.
5 - Insurance for “in-transit” as well as “household” Users should be able to arrange once off travel insurance for their belongings (for the duration of the move/travel), as well as household insurance, for as long as they want.
MARKET RESEARCH
Before starting with the design of the first paper prototype, the market research took place, looking at the products available in the market, what needs they were covering and how. This step inspired our project and we could see that our product would offer a set of features that other apps were not covering as a whole. The app would include: search, comparatives, chat with companies, getting insurances, integrated camera to create albums and documentation and sharing option.
PROTOTYPING
The goal of this part of the project was to translate the most promising idea from the user research to a prototype, using a low-fidelity prototyping techniques such as paper prototype.
Initial Paper prototype created by Matteo Mogno
COGNITIVE WALKTHROUGH
Three scenarios were defined to develop the cognitive walkthroughs focusing on these questions:
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Will users be trying to produce the right outcome?
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Will users see the correct action to produce the outcome? (visibility)
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Will users realise that this is the action they need to take to achieve the correct outcome? (or might choose another alternative instead?)
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Will users understand the feedback? That is, if users performed the correct action, will they be able to tell that they made progress toward their intended outcome?
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Results:
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The user does not understand that an action is needed to reach the goal
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Not know that he is expected to select the company icon to enter the company menu (add extra icon to ‘continue process’)
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Not realize that he has to select the option of which stuff to be insured (‘quick demo’)
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Not know how to reset filters (add ‘search box’ and ‘add filters’)
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Not know where to click to upload or share list
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Not clear for user that he can add an item by clicking on an empty box (‘info when hover over the box’)
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The user doesn’t see the correct control
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Not realise that by selecting the company icon he will continue doing the rest of the process (‘continue process’ button)
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Confused about the need of fill in item details, uploading receipt or doing both tasks (‘more actions’ button, include ‘upload receipt inside photo details as optional: → ‘fill in or upload’)
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User doesn’t seem to have a way to select 1 or multiple items.
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User doesn’t seem to have a way to skip or save steps for continuing later.
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The user does not realize that the correct choice actually is correct
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Could have info explaining that fill in all sections is required in order to continue with the next step (fields marked as *compulsory)
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Not know whether by hitting the + button user will access the app camera or his phone gallery to add pictures from it. (use ‘take photo’ or ‘upload from gallery’ instead of ‘add photo’)
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User might not know if he should be sending email or add to insurance (images saved are automatically added to insurance)
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The user would be aware how many other users rated each offer, and if it’s a customers’ opinion or other institutional rating
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Feedback needed:
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No feedback to show that after fill in all sections user has to tap the arrow at the bottom right to go to the next window (‘highlighted button’)
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User might not know if when tapping ‘insure all’ the app will also save items to the library or he would have to save them to insure them. (images are automatically saved to library ‘saved to library’ )
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Couldn’t know if the filters applied give a number of results > 0 (view filter settings, or breadcrumbs on screen)
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Wouldn’t remember that he has applied filters (filter highlighted → ‘see filters applied’
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USER TESTING
The prototype (still a paper prototype) was refined and improved to be ready for user testing, and all the usability problems found on the previous stage were fixed. The name of the app (Insure Mondo) was selected after brainstorming some ideas. A user test plan was also prepared to document how and when the prototype test would take place.
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The users who participated on the testing were the same participants from the user research interviews - people within 30 to 65 years old, who have an insurance. All of them frequent users of mobile apps.
Some screens of the redesigned paper prototype created by Matteo Mogno
TESTS RESULTS
1. List of features that worked well
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Our app for facilitating the tasks of selecting a insurance company, contacting the company and photo-documenting belongings worked well. Users were able to perform the tasks without major problems, just as we expected, especially the photo-documenting part. It appears to be very well implemented. After the tests we got some interesting ideas for improvements and mostly positive feedback. One user said: "Having all these features together in a single app is great!”
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2. List of features that did not work well
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Probably, having used a low-fidelity prototype (paper-based) has been a good choice at this stage of the design. Since we collected several ideas for improvements. But overall it limited the interaction of the user with the app. For this reason, to document belongings our process is as follow: Add first belonging >> take photo >> add to library, and some users didn’t understand well as the last step felt repetitive.
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Editing and deleting items in libraries were not part of the user test steps but some users still expressed concern about the usability and size of those buttons.
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3. List of ideas for additional features and design improvements resulting from the user tests
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Lacking a direct access to home page at the nav bar was confusing, some users would’ve liked to access directly to it from there. Furthermore, the login page was misleading since no re-entering of password or strength check was included in current design.
We included the usual way for signing up with email google or facebook, however some users mentioned that to facilitate the process, using fingerprint sign in system would be very useful.
A general sense of lack of security has been expressed, this could be fixed up with a verification of user (e.g. requiring scanning of ID) while attempting to subscribe an insurance policy.
A direct chat line with the insurance company could be very useful as well.
VISUAL DESIGN
The course finished with the user testing phase. Then I decided to go one step further and keep working individually on the visual design. The style chosen was clean and minimal, using the blue as a the primary colour of the app. A logo was also developed using a simplified version of a lotus flower due to its relation to universe (in some cultures) and to transmit a sensation of security and peace of mind.
