Protect

Protect is a product that lets people learn about and tailor their employee insurance benefit, making sure their needs are met regardless of life's changes.

Protect offers 3 types of insurance, Life cover, Income protection and Critical illness cover, with details and guides for each to help people understand which cover is right for them as well as how much they might need.

It also allows people to adjust the cover given to them by their employer as well as purchase additional cover straight from their salaries at any time, making sure that people have access to the cover that suites them.

Problem

Salary Finance is an Employee Benefit provider that partners with employers around the world in order to help their employees become financially healthier.

Salary Finance offers a range of financial products linked to the employee's salary, from low cost loans repaid through your salary, to early access to your salary and savings accounts that make saving easy and rewarding.

Legal & General, an investor in Salary Finance, came to us with the aim of creating an employee insurance benefit as their current workplace insurance benefits weren't selling as much as they wanted to.

Outcome

Legal & General wanted to increase the number of clients they signed up as well as the amount of cover purchased on an individual level by the employee.

Role

I was lead product designer on this project, working alongside a PM and lead developer. We also worked closely with the L&G content team as well as a number of project managers and insurance experts on their side.

Research

In order to understand problems that we could solve and areas where we could add value, I put together a research plan.

As the majority of L&Gs existing research was for their retail products, I ran a proto-persona workshop in order to come up with and align on who we thought our users were.

We then conducted research with these personas as well as employers in order to 1) understand their needs 2) refine our personas.

  • Face to face & remote user interviews (Employers & Employees)

  • Usability tests (existing insurance products)

  • Surveys (Employers & Employees)

  • Competitor research

  • Existing data analysis

  • Stakeholder & Expert interviews

What we found out

Employees

  • Didn’t understand the different kinds of insurance or what they might be used for

  • Didn’t know how much they might need

  • Didn’t know which kinds of insurance they needed

  • Didn’t know the level of cover they had with their current workplace insurance

  • Felt rushed and didn’t put much thought into their choices during the annual window for adjustments

  • Didn’t want to think about death or illness

  • Didn’t think they needed to think about insurance yet

  • Adjusted their personal insurance as their needs changed (around life events)

Employer

  • Wanted it to be cost effective

  • Didn’t want additional admin

  • Wanted to see engagement

  • Wanted it to be attractive to employees

User Problem

Then as a team we aligned on the problem that we believed that by solving, gave us the best chance of achieving our business outcomes, before writing it up as a problem statement.

“People in the workplace need an insurance benefit that helps them understand and tailor their insurance, because people don’t want to spend time thinking about insurance and their needs frequently change.”

Solution

I then ran brainstorming sessions where we thought about how we could solve this problem for the user. We reframed the problems we had discovered and brainstormed different ways to solve them. Making sure to align as a team as we went forward.

How might we

  • Make insurance easily understandable and engaging?

  • Help people understand which types and how much insurance is right for them?

  • Make sure the user has the right level of cover as their circumstances change?

Assumption Mapping

Before moving to design, I ran an assumption mapping session to highlight our riskiest assumptions and unknowns. We then brainstormed how best to answer these outstanding questions in order to move forward with confidence.

Some of the things that came out of that session were:

  • Will employers want this for their employees?

  • Should we allow users to change their cover whenever they want?

  • Will employees want to buy insurance through their workplace?

Answering our riskiest unknowns

We then set about finding answers to our riskiest unknowns.

  • Competitor & market research

  • Prototypes & Usability Testing

  • Sales Pitches

  • Surveys

Prototype & Test

To answer some of our questions we would conduct usability tests, sales pitches, false doors etc. so we needed a prototype. I ran sessions like user story mapping to come up with what we thought the MVP solution could look like. working closely with the crossfunctional team, as well as the wider business (sales, marketing etc.).

We then conducted research with both employers and employees using a number of variations of the prototype. Some of the things that came out of the things that came out of our research were:

  • People weren’t clear on who was paying for what

  • People weren’t finding the information they needed about each product

Delivery

As the development team were involved in the design of this product, we were able to start to build parts of the product as we went through and validated them.

Outcome

  • This product is currently in beta and initial evaluation shows that it’s performing well.

  • We’ve already signed up a number of employers.