Vitality | Consumer Risk Profiling
The Problem: Vitality, a provider of health and life insurance, wanted to be able to offer Dynamic Planner’s existing risk profiling process to its clients to support their investment choices. The challenges were:
Taking a complex user journey which was designed to be explained to clients by professional financial advisers, and redesigning it so clients could complete it on their own via their website
Meeting Vitality’s requirement and brand guidelines, including responsiveness
Developing a product that could be easily customised for other customers
Understanding the problem and process
I started by working with Vitality’s business analysts to understand and define their requirements, and to understand their requirements from a compliance perspective. In parallel with this, I did a deep dive into how the Dynamic Planner risk profiling process worked with the product owner and technical team. Normally this would be done by internal business analysts, but having recently achieved my BCS Business Analysis Practice Certificate, this was a useful exercise in applying process mapping and requirements definition.
Designing a solution
Early-stage design work started before the requirements were fully signed off, in order to meet tight deadlines. A responsive prototype was created in Axure, starting from a broad user journey map before moving to the individual screens. Early prototypes were low-fidelity wireframes to focus the client’s attention on the detail of the interactions, but later prototypes added in the client’s branding.
One of the design challenges was to develop the solution as something which could be delivered for other clients, and this required working closely with the development team to ensure the design was built in a way that allowed the branding and certain elements of the copy to be amended easily.
Multiplatform testing
User testing was performed with 10 participants who came into the Dynamic Planner office to work through the process. These participants were selected to be representative of the target market for the product, and received a small payment for their time. Each participant went through the end to end process having been given a scenario to put their use in context, and asked to talk aloud about what they were thinking and feeling. Having worked through the design, they were also asked to comment on the 3 ways being considered for how potential investment returns could be presented.
The client was aware of this testing and the results, which helped to increase their confidence that the work would deliver a robust solution for their customers. I initially wrote a design specification, then worked with the product owner to break it down into user stories to be built. Working closely with the development team ensured that the most challenging aspects of the design were investigated early on.
The initial design presented the potential returns using language that was standard for the market, together with a small amount of visual styling.
Result
The project was delivered on time and to budget, with a solution that could easily be applied to meet the needs of other clients (and it’s still available!). On a broader level, this project helped to establish a pattern of working closely with developers at Dynamic Planner which became key to successful future working.