Making the insurance app experience accessible and informative for new parents in India
TEAM MEMBERS
2 Designers, Product Lead, Client side consultant
TIMELINE
1 month
ROLE
This project was part of a proposal to a client that provided group insurance plans to employers. As insurance plans become increasingly common among employers in India, there's a noticeable surge in a new demographic: young adults.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Critical user journeys are still stuck in outdated systems
Adding a newborn to a healthcare plan is a critical life moment that often happens under stress — yet many insurance providers still rely on manual, phone-based processes that are opaque, time-consuming, and emotionally draining for new parents.
For our client, this created friction during a key customer touchpoint and risked both user satisfaction and retention.
AUDIENCE
Designing for new parents, who want to add their child to the insurance plan
Gaining initial exposure to insurance
Parents that have very often not used insurance before
Stressed new parents
They often find navigating the complexities of insurance policies to be an additional challenge they are unprepared for.
RESEARCH
We wanted to find out more about the problem. We had about 1 week to research. We triangulated our research from our participants interviews and existing reviews of the app
QUESTIONS CONSIDERED
What they use insurance for currently
New parent's frustrations and pain points
Customer background and cultural context
Interviews conducted
I interviewed 4 participants for this study. The target demographic for this product is young Indian adults, typically recently married with both partners working.
There was a lack of trust amongst the people I interviewed, they had previous bad experiences with insurance.
Common threads through interviews
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
How might we help new parents make the best use of their group insurance plan?
DESIGN GOALS
Improve Accessibility
Parents find it difficult to use insurance app since it had a ton of hidden features and it was difficult to find what to do.
Simplify Complex Tasks
Many tasks (such as adding a new member onto plan) need to be completed by calling the insurance agent and waiting on line to get the work done.
Create Value
Creating value beyond financial benefits. How might we use this platform to enhance the lives of new parents.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Task 1- Better informing the customer about what the plan covers, and providing easy access to insurance details
Goals: Providing insurance details in a way that is easy for customers to access
Action: I redesigned the homepage to highlight the most commonly used actions, making it easier for users to navigate. I also added a feature where customers can download their insurance card as a PDF and share it whenever needed.
Key Features
Easy access to insurance details
Insurance details more visible and accessible from the mobile home-screen. Customers would not have to contact customer support to know their insurance details
Add a member option provided in app
Simplified the process of adding a beneficiary by introducing a clearly visible option within the app.
Keeping a 'help' option
There are some questions that the customer's have that can't be answered through the app and FAQs. In this case we kept the option for requesting callback
DESIGN DECISIONS
Task 2- Creating action items for the customer to prompt them to complete adding their child
Insight: The process of adding a child to the plan is tedious. There is no on app way to do this currently.
Opportunity: Automate this process- the reminder is triggered internally by the system when the patient claims for delivery. Create action items that are displayed on the home screen
Key Features
Accommodation for adding documents later
We found that families did not get a birth certificate on time, this made it difficult for them to add their child onto the plan and get reimbursed. So we made it so that the customer could send in the application and upload the certificate later. This would shorten wait times.
Informing the System
The forms change slightly depending on when the parent adds a child to the policy
Transparency about new premium
It can be a shock to suddenly have an increased premium after adding a child to the plan, even if it's standard procedure. We wanted to ensure that we keep the new premium transparent
Happy Paths and Edge Cases
There were a ton of considerations to be made for something in the process going wrong. The customers had previous poor experiences with insurance and we wanted to ensure that they could find help during the process.
There were cultural considerations as well, such as naming the child later, not immediately after birth. That caused complications in the insurance process. Our design approach not only focused on the ideal scenario but also addressed these specific challenges.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Task 3- A healthcare planning resource and schedule for new parents
The new parents had not anticipated the amount of healthcare appointments post birth
Opportunity: Make the app a starting point for the parent's medical journey, provide resources keep them informed
LEARNING
I quickly realized that one of the fastest way of building trust is creating clear and transparent presentation of information.
In UX interviews, I’ve learned that sensemaking isn’t about finding the “right” answer, it’s about listening for patterns in the chaos and letting the user’s reality reshape your assumptions.
