Case Study: The MoreThan IA Project

Websites at insurance companies have typically been broken down into several sections, usually dependant on the back-end technology. The ‘brochureware’ section of MoreThan had been identified as needing improvement and I was briefed to ‘fix the IA’. Brochureware is used to both signpost important tasks (get a quote, claim etc) as well as house information deemed relevant to customers. 
Various insights were showing that the focus on new customers was preventing current customers from completing their tasks and driving them to the call centre, frustrating customers and costing the business money. 

The analytics team had observed that current customers coming back to the site were struggling to complete their tasks. Another member of the UX team had received approval to run a true intent survey from the homepage to try and establish who was coming to the site and what they were trying to do. The survey had run it’s course and while initial results had validated the analytics team’s observations, the results were yet to be assessed fully.
A previous ‘brochureware’ redesign for MoreThan had resulted in a fall in desired customer behaviour so this project was briefed with maintaining (and improving) current sales KPIs whilst trying to reduce the calls to the call centre.  
I realised early on that while I was asked to ‘do the IA’, there were a lot of other constraints that would need addressing.

The audience was comprised of two broad groups of people, new / potential customers and current customers. As a result of the true intent survey, within those groups we found subgroups. Our new customers were looking to find out more about MoreThan, the brand values and how the products compared with the rest of the market as well as get a quote. Our current customers were looking to do anything from checking their policy, changing something, renewing or claiming.
As a UX designer the customers were my obvious focus but in retrospect, the audience were also key members of the business who we weren’t initially aware of.

As the lead UX designer, I worked with a content strategist new to IA, a more junior UI designer looking to develop their IA skills and a (very busy) product owner who’d never heard of IA.

There were numerous constraints that impacted the brochureware. Some of them impacted the IA directly, some of them would just impact the implementation and roll-out. These included:

  -The brand team were planning to update and re-launch the MoreThan branding and wanted that reflected online. 
  -The wider digital team were frustrated that they couldn’t update the site as easily as they wanted so were pushing for a new content management system.
  -The business had been adding content to the site for years via small projects which had resulted in a very disjointed experience.
  -The product range had outgrown the limited master navigation and MoreThan could no longer promote their key products with any hierarchy.
  -There were no dedicated developers to help us understand the plans for a new CMS or help us realise our plans and ideas in a coded prototype.
  -We didn’t have a scrum master or business analyst to help us plan blocks of work identify and document requirements.

I began discovery by reviewing all 1400 true intent survey responses and sorted them into groups to reflect actionable customer behaviours.

Shortly afterwards I organised and ran a workshop with the product team and staff in customer facing roles to help identify gaps in customer goals and behaviour that the site should support.

Working with the content strategist, we assessed what content we had on the site and if it matched any of our customer or business goals. We also tried to find any gaps in the content that wasn’t addressing the tasks the customers are trying to complete.

Early design:
Blocking out content as one section per post-it, we tried to establish a site and page hierarchy that would help customers meet their goals. As we brought more stakeholders on board, we used the post-its to show that a mobile first approach to IA design is most effective as you are always forced to decide on a hierarchy. As post-its are about the same width as a mobile, people seemed to understand and appreciate this.

We started to flesh this out with slightly more detailed content and explored the following structures:

  - Divide the site up by customer segments - new customer vs current customer. 
  I ran some guerrilla testing and we identified they weren’t terms the customers were expecting, so didn’t resonate with them.
  - Escalate tasks to top level like Gov.uk etc. 
  By highlighting key tasks the customer was trying to complete, we planned to help people navigate to appropriate sections of the site and deliver them relevant content. However, we found out the product level (i.e. car insurance, home insurance etc) customer account areas were built on older, separate back-end systems which prevented a simple ‘login’ button from working for all customers. This would mean customer would always need to select a ‘product’ after their ‘task’, and not all tasks were built for all products.
  - Start ‘product first’ .
  As customers always had to choose a product at some point in their journey, we started with the products and guided users to product hub pages to get to their tasks. We grouped tasks where relevant and progressively disclosed further information where and when it was needed. this involved integrating ‘customer help’ (and other previously ‘siloed’ content) into the site at relevant points, rather than sit in it’s own section. 

The designer worked closely with their wider design team to help realise the branding team’s new identity on the site. 

I then led the roll-out plan to ensure the new designs wouldn’t cause any issues like the previous re-launch. This meant building new pages lower level pages as A/B tests to make sure the customers could still achieve what they wanted. As the tests ran, we setup more A/B tests then rolled out the rest of the site.

Key Learnings
Due to the lack of available developers and larger project team, I was put on another project team and the site got a slower than expected roll-out and handover. This meant some of the design principles were unclear to newer members of the team and weren’t realised as effectively as they could have been. Given the lack of immediate dev resource, a more effective output would have been a ‘brochureware design system’ rather than wireframes and sitemaps.