Global Gateway
Innovation Group’s global InsureTech product.
3
Workstreams
5
Global Regions
217
Jira tasks completed
The Brief
I joined Innovation Group for a few reasons: Firstly, I wanted to expand my horizons from broadcasting by working withinin the booming Finance and InsureTech industry on a Web app providing a B2B SaaS solution. This was very new to me and would help me explore a service-focused side of Product Design I hadn’t yet been exposed to. Secondly, from conversations with the Head of UX and Product, it became clear that the role would come with great autonomy, being able to own the full Design strategy and direction.
Gateway is the company’s key InsureTech Web app, enabling accident claim management within the motor, property and service plan/warranty industries for clients including Tesla, Toyota, Aviva and Enterprise. A first version of the platform (shown here) was live when I joined, combining software features from over 300 aquisitions that Innovation Group made in recent years. Gateways is used by insurance companies, garages and claimants (such as somebody who has had a car accident) and it’s functionality covers claim logging, onboarding new garages onto our network and insights dashboards, such as the NPS Report shown above. The brief was broad and exciting: Through Design Thinking, transform Gateway into an on-brand platform fit for the InsureTech industry and aligned across all business area and regions. This included the UK, Germany, North America, South African and Australia.
Considerations
As a company dealing with large volumes of data, I felt it was crucial we would leverage that for the benefit of the Design team. Therefor I sent out regular surveys to our users and set up analytics for the platform by using Hotjar. This allowed us to learn all about our user’s needs behaviour, which I would then in turn use to justify our decisions. For example, the image shown here confirms what we suspected for a long time. The existing hamburger menu works well for mobile, but on desktop it unnecessarily collapses our menu. It is the most clicked area of the screen, which means we can consider expanding this by default on large screens.
As the company was fully remote during the pandemic, a major challenge was to keep the team on track for Design delivery. It was crucial for me to document a foundation for the team to rely on. By establishing a single source of truth on Jira and Confluence I could ensure the team was fully aligned. I built a Kanban board around Design Thinking methodology and ensured we took all tasks through the key phases, including research and testing.
My role and process
Innovation Group recently moved offices and only two Product Designers from the Design Team at the time were able to move with them. Being the organisation’s Design Manager gave me the chance to reset our ways-of-working and pull the team out of Product into our own self-sustaining entity. There was ample opportunity to maximise our Design effectiveness to improve our Gateway product through ways of organisation, motivation and creativity. This meant setting design principles, ways-of-working and a design system amongst others. Over the years I’ve learned that speaking to users is a key element of good UX design, so I was keen to make that work virtually. For example, this video shows us testing over Zoom in our German region on the last day of our Google Design Sprint; we validated our new multi-authentification login designs as well as a dashboard for garages/bodyshops.
I set up a manageable amount of online catch-ups to allow for heads-down work; Design reviews and planning sessions, 1:1 chats and twice-weekly ‘stand-ups’. Looking at the Product roadmaps, I soon realised we would need another pair of helping hands so I hired a third Product Designer. This meant I could now assign one Designer to each of the three business areas, allowing them to own and drive their workstream in close collaboration with Product and Tech.
Outcome
Global Gateway has recently launched in the German Motor market and will soon be fully rolling out it’s Property functionality in North America. My team continues to grow and deliver UX solutions across all regions and workstreams. Our high output has convinced the Product Team to adopt a Design-led approach, defining the course of the product with our visuals. My Design Kanban is used daily and is the hub for tracking and documenting our Design tasks. By calculating ‘story points’ per task, I distribute the workload fairly and build the case for team growth. We keep stakeholders involved with regular workshops such as Google Design Sprints (shown here) and whiteboarding exercises.
