Life insurance calculator

Project: Life insurance calculator, quote tool, and landing page

Company: Principal
My Role: Lead UX Designer + research
Duration: 9 months
Date: 2020-2021
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We built two tools, a calculator and a quoting tool, which worked as a pair to get leads for Life Insurance. In addition, we built a marketing landing page to help with campaigns.

Final result

🔹 Leads +46%
🔹 Sales +9%
🔹 Premium +14%
🔹 Shared at Global 250 conference

How was this achieved? An interative process of prototype, test, and learn in 3 cycles. Before building!

The problem

From a business standpoint, the existing online tool wasn't driving enough leads. A lay-person could see it was a poor experience.

The problem we ultimately solved for users was the ability to see prices for multiple amounts and term lengths easily, all at once.

This was based on the insight that people overestimate the cost for coverage.

We could see in the data, a very common error was folks putting in less than 200k as their desired coverage amount.

The process

Three rounds of testing

First impressions were key to the success of the product - for which there are many competitors, with a non-captive audience pulled from the web.

So, I created a series of front-page only mocks with no interaction to test, in parallel, what people were most likely to like "off the bat".

Testing: Round one

Here you can see the mentioned mocks:

Consolidating feedback

From our testing we received feedback in qualitative form, which was processed using an 'affinity diagram' technique.

We also received quantitative results about the various prototypes:

Testing: Round 2

The qual and quant feedback led to revisions. New prototypes were created for another round of testing.

Testing: Round 3

This time, rather than preference testing between versions, we were usability testing a prototype, which was advanced and performed like a real website.

Developer hand-off

The development team was small in number, but talented. I wanted to make the handoff as easy as possible so they could build it quickly.

To that end, I created an interactive hand-off document.

Creating the top-of-funnel

The final piece of the puzzle was creating a marketing lander as the top of the funnel on the Principal.com website.

We employed A/B testing which improved conversion. Here is an in-prod screenshot:

Final thoughts

When this project started, I didn't have a lot of experience. I was confident in the principals I had been taught, and they worked as promised.

What I learned is that deep research can pay off even in seemingly basic or boilerplate products.

Looking back, I was lucky to have so much autonomy to do things with care. It took longer to do the research than to develop! Imagine that in today's 'build now' paridigm.