Filing insurance claims is always a tricky process, add cultural components, laws, and regulations on top of this and you have a complicated puzzle of information that needs to become coherent in a filing process. For this research project, I performed research to better understand the UK veterinary market and the needs of its users.
This customer is one of the largest consolidated veterinary service providers in the United Kingdom. Not only that but they also own over 500 veterinary surgery throughout the UK, Netherlands, and the Republic of Ireland.
”"How can we improve the insurance workflow process for our customer, so that it fits their user and market needs, while taking less time and effort to complete?"
There were several things that needed to be learned to understand what this project entailed and thus literature research became the logical starting point. This exploratory method helped identify common themes and needs based on the market and legal requirements for the UK’s insurance claim process; conditions, excess fees, continuation claims, and debt allocation. These 4 topics and the information that was found would drive the rest of the research forward.
The first task was to get a grasp on the issues with the current workflow within our product. I organized a focus group (image 1, image 2) with our users to learn more about these 4 topics found in the literature research. Through a KWE (know, wonder, experienced) framework, these topics were highlighted and discussed. Through this, we learned what knowledge there is among users, but also what they question and what they have experienced so far within their day-to-day regardless of our product.
Next up was to organise a session with stakeholders to analyse the experiences of the current product. This stakeholder walkthrough (image 3) included users, designers, researchers, and product owners who came together to discuss the existing workflow. Our goal for this session was to identify pain points, confusion, and opportunities for the redesign of the insurance workflow.
Based on these 3 methods, which we have repeated a few times throughout the development of the new insurance workflow, we worked with design and development requirements (image 4). These were designed based on user stories and system stories. As we had found many things that could use improvement, but only a little amount of time, we needed to talk to the team to identify where to focus our attention on for the redesign. This is where the in scope, and order of importance row comes in.
As filing, the insurance claim took a lot of effort for the users, conscious decisions needed to be made as to how to reduce the user’s cognitive load without losing the required fields. Findings from the research showed us where automation could take place and how connections between fields were supposed to work. These helped us identify where to auto-fill fields, what started out as collapsed, and which fields could be removed.
Paying is never a favorite aspect for customers but, when you take away the currency signs, it becomes psychologically easier to make the purchase. I used this theory throughout the window decorator module.
To reduce the time spent we automated several processes, such as the previously seen automation in end dates of claims. One important aspect of insurance claims is being able to upload the correct invoices to the claim. However, going through all the different invoices is time-consuming. Instead, we focus on the items that are part of the claim and have the system automatically connect the right invoices. This way, the user does not have to find the invoices themselves nor do they have to highlight what parts of the invoices are part of the claim as that has already been done.
After insurance claims are filed, the insurance claim company will check the claim and decide what parts will be covered or partially covered. The veterinary practice will receive a printed letter back with the details. These then still have to get added to the system. This used to take a lot of time, by adding a row-by-row as well as overall coverage feature we make it easier for users to stay on top of their administration.
This project was a collaboration between me on UX research and Hesam Khodabakshi as principal product designer. To give more insights into the collaborative process we’ve written an article that I published on Medium.com.
Due to this project currently being in production, I am not able to upload the project files (research documentation and Figma files). However am more than happy to showcase the project if you are interested.
Feel free to contact me via info@odettejansen.nl
