Opportunity

There were a variety of paths a user might go through to purchase multiple lines of insurance. They’d likely arrive at a central website, but then they’d quickly branch off to any number of other paths.

Most of the time, the initial data input wouldn’t persist to the other form they had to fill out, so customers could theoretically end up filling out the same form multiple times. It reduces trust, increases frustration and isn’t necessarily a constraint or requirement of the system.

Because we had a huge team of cross-functional folks trying to define the opportunity space, we wanted to create maps for the general current-state experience, and then map out the prospective future-state experience. The example shown below is a fairly anonymized version of a flow for a user attempting to purchase just two lines of insurance.

The most critical part of this was identifying how each of the steps and touchpoints aligned with some core experience principles (the yellow annotations at the bottom) and accounting to ensure we were evenly distributing all meaningful interactions across all opportunities and channels.

Creating a Map

With the benefit of hindsight and 7+ years between this and my more recent work, I realize that isn’t going to win any awards. However, we were tasked with representing a birds-eye view of the customer experience, and needed to specifically delineate what was in and out of scope (the opaque sections) for our first iteration.

Building Empathy

Above, we see a a zoomed-in view of the layers of the experience map, breaking out epics, states, touchpoints, events, interactions, actors, and experience requirements. Below, a detailed view of the experience requirements, which were compiled from a series of user interviews (the yellow dots are anonymized codes for the participant session.)

We knew that the experience was frustrating in its current state, and hoped to anchor our solution in a truly user-centered space. Being able to visually see the number of yellow dots in the broad view, and also where there were a lack of dots allowed us to understand where our user focus was low, and where the team had an opportunity to focus as we pursued the project.