Case study: How usability tests can help your product growth
I recently joined the claimsforce team as a product designer to help the company scale and grow its products. In the beginning, it was hard for me to understand the business logic and complexity, and I can even say that sometimes it still is.
The context
So, to give you a bit of context in a nutshell perspective, here is an introduction: claimsforce is a company that provides software as a service for the insurance industry with the mission to create great claims experiences.
You may ask, what is it concretely? Let’s go for an example: Imagine you got a water leakage in your bathroom and you have an insurance policy that covers that. You call your insurance and give all the information about the damage you have. After this call, in the backstage, the insurance company gets in touch with professionals called experts on evaluating the damages. These experts are responsible persons for getting in touch with the policyholder, collect and document all the information and create a report and send it back to the Insurer.
Only this is already complex enough. But imagine now, that this expert can be a freelancer, or an insurer employee, or even a third party company employee (AKA TPAs). Yeah.. the nutshell perspective doesn’t seem so simple anymore.
Listening to the customers
As a way to solve this complexity, one of the company’s foundations is to listen to the customers constantly in order to collect feedback and understand all parties’ struggles, pain points, and needs on multiple topics.
One of these topics constantly knocking on our door was the navigation of the product. We gathered a good amount of feedback about our users having troubles with the following problems:
- Frustrations when trying to navigate back and forward inside the product
- Main and internal menu conflicting for priority
- Claim information hierarchy was confusing
Besides that, we also did a heuristic analysis to discover problems and inconsistencies impacting on users to do their best job, and these were the main findings:
- The navigation menu was not clear (switching depending on the page, icon-based menu, and others)
- Visual differences between the product for different parties were bringing confusion
- Lack of scalability
Exploration
With those feedbacks in mind and a few assumptions, we decided to explore the topic, generate ideas, and discuss internally about improvements.
A lot of options were generated with pros and cons about them until we found the one we thought was the “best” solution (considering feasibility and impact on users). To make sure we were heading the right way, we decided to run a usability test.
Usability test & Outcome
The script of the usability test had its main focus on the findability of the features and secondly on collecting feedback about visuals.
The good thing about findability goals is that you can test with anyone, and that is what we did. We shared a clickable prototype with users who had a lot of experience, some experience, and no experience at all with our product, and then gave them 4–6 tasks to complete, depending on the user role. Here’s the outcome:
Apart from answering the questions we also got valuable insights and findings from the users:
- For experienced users the icon-based menu is enough, for new users more copy alongside the icons is necessary
- Claim card information is not clear and looks messy
- Quick editing functionality on claim card would be nice to have
- Icons are not always clear but make the UX more delightful
Getting the answers to our questions made us confident in moving the solution forward after a few necessary iterations based on feedback and here’s a small piece of the outcome:
What next?
The best thing about testing your solutions and listening to your customers is that you always find some room for improvements, and it wasn’t different this time. By exploring and solving the main navigation problem we were able to discover that the claim card information we display is not as clear as we thought. So we already put this item into our radar as a next item to iterate on, between others:
- track new navigation and collect more feedback for improvements
- iterate on the claim card information
- simplify experts workflow / Reduce effort to complete report
- calculation improvements
Conclusion
I hope this article be able to guide you in one of the ways to approach product growth in your company. And if you are interested in getting to know claimsforce a bit better and understand this fast-growing industry, make us a visit :)
