Insurance is vital and essential to any homeowner, yet BCAA found that potential customers were consistently getting stuck when they were seeking quotes and making insurance purchases through their website. With new entrants providing users the ability to easily purchase home insurance online, BCAA wanted to find a way to transform their online purchase flow into one that emulated the comfort of working one-on-one with one of their trusted advisors. To tackle this, they engaged Invoke to bring our user-centric approach to redesigning their home insurance purchase flow.

The target market for homeowner and rental insurance is broad and diverse, so there’s a long list of potential needs and goals to work with. To uncover what these are, we immersed ourselves in the world of insurance with an in-depth discovery and research process that included a variety of workshops, interviews, competitive and comparable audits, extensive co-working at the BCAA offices, and more.

Through this, we saw that more than anything people needed to understand insurance before they could feel good about purchasing it. To guide us there, we identified a set of objectives, including: clearly articulate key value propositions, reduce steps to get users to a quote faster, capture contact information early so we can save progress and enable users to return later, guide users to complete accurate policies, and assist them with contextual information and omnichannel support throughout the process. By meeting these objectives we could increase clarity and ensure the insurance process isn’t so intimidating to new purchasers.

Our solutions start as an extensive series of hypotheses. These are derived from our research and posit that if a feature or capability is available then a specific benefit will occur. These hypotheses cover user behaviours like an ability to customize insurance policies, business value like integrating the ability to purchase additional products like a BCAA membership, technical feasibility like how databases can be utilized to autocomplete information, or a combination of the three.

Testing hypotheses involves a mix of market and technical validation. To validate hypotheses that drive user and business value, we want to see what users will do. Will they like the feature and will they take the action that benefits the business? By assembling testing artifacts using comparable examples from the market, sketches, and quick prototypes we can gather feedback on a concept before building a fully functioning solution. Meanwhile, our technical team researches and validates the capabilities of technology solutions to ensure concepts are feasible. With these methods, we are able to validate a direction and prioritize a features roadmap.

Validating hypotheses ensures we’re heading in the right direction, but in order to stay on the right path we continually test our proposed solutions with users. Our work with BCAA involved running user testing sessions every two weeks where, in order to get the most actionable results, we focused each round on specific hypotheses or sections of the flow.

These testing sessions helped reveal areas where the flow felt cumbersome, missing information that customers needed to proceed, interactions that weren’t intuitive, language that confused, and more.