The challenge
Assupol is a life and financial services company based in South Africa with their vision being to provide investment and life insurance products and services to as many South African citizens as possible, making their offerings accessible to all demographic groups.
However, their client-facing website, known as the Client and Rewards Portal, currently does not fully align with the company's vision. It lacks several in-person services that should be made available online, hindering the company's goal of inclusivity and accessibility. With over 500,000 total sign ups to the website, this was an opportunity to introduce a completely fresh approach to the service.
The solution
To address this concern, I asked myself continuously while on the project: "How do I provide value to stakeholders while also producing high quality, user-centered designs?". To help answer this question I first looked at creating relationships with key stakeholders within the project that can help with providing information to be used in the planning and analysis phase of the design process. From here, this was useful to be able to further engage with stakeholders in workshops and to collaborate more closely with subject matterexperts who have a vast amount of domain knowledge.
After gathering information, I created a feature backlog consisting of requirements and design debt that contained critical design requirements such as a notice banner for emergency alerts. I prioritised tasks in alignment with the team and business, focusing on delivering features that provide maximum value to users within the shortest timeframe. To address design work arounds for technical issues, I facilitated workshops and arranged desk checks with developers to monitor progress and seek design-related clarifications.
The results
Below are some of the designs that I created throughout my time on the project. The project placed a greater need on designing features which will feature as part of the ecosystem which will eventually see an overhaul. Using that as a central motivation for design, I used the opportunity to focus on reducing the reliance of the colour red (as seen in the first image below) which was previously a dominating colour in the current designs by introducing a subtle navy blue colour to that could compliment the rest of the organisation's corporate identity.
Additionally, I worked on designing and introducing ways to create awareness of the importance of design in an effort to educate stakeholders that design is more than just about "pushing pixels". For the one feature, I started off by workshopping a journey map together with my team. The result of this was being able to flesh out an even more detailed requirements document that takes into consideration the user experience of a new feature.
From here on, working together with the business analyst who drew up a requirements document for this, I created designs that centred around the points idenfitied in the journey map. Below are a few of these designs:
Next steps and lessons learnt
At the moment, development is currently underway with the redesigned flows scheduled to go live within the next few months. The plan is to monitor customer sentiment and monitor web traffic on the Client and Rewards Portal to determine whether there is any return on investment on the redesigns in an effort to identify any areas of improvement. The other features which I designed for are also scheduled to release this year once development and quality assurance testing is complete.
Throughout the course of this project, I have gained valuable insights through various themes that havecontributed to its success. One crucial lesson I learned was the significance of effective stakeholder management. Building strong relationships with key stakeholders allowed me to understand their expectations, gather essential information, and incorporate their feedback throughout the design process, resulting in a more user-centric and satisfactory end product.
Another critical aspect that emerged from this project was the importance of adhering to UI design principles. Employing principles like consistency, simplicity, and accessibility not only enhanced the overall aesthetics of the product but also improved user experience and usability as per feedback from a few users that I did user testing with.
From a more personal front, I closely understood the importance of understanding key expecations of client. I say this as the project demanded a lot more visual design skills and that in turn was a driving motivation to vastly improve on my visual design skills. This proved to be highly effective as I produced designs were in line with user-centered design standards together with adding a fresh visual flair take to an existing service used by many South African citizens.
