Gaining User Trust
InsurGrid thrust me into the world of Midwestern insurance agents.
Selling insurance was a specialized, time-consuming, and exhausting job. Most insurance policies were underwritten with a “declaration page,” which needed to be renewed annually.
During renewal season, life became very difficult for insurance agents. While their profession relied on upselling, the majority of an agent’s time was occupied by chasing down existing clients for policy renewals.
InsurGrid’s goal was to provide an easily accessible client database for agents; a unified tool that let agents catalog their clients and keep track of their policies.
When I joined InsurGrid, both the product and its marketing had UX pain points.
Improving the product UX was straightforward – the core functionalities worked well, the CEO trusted the design team to make design decisions. I studied essential use cases to understand the flow, then worked with product designers to reduce friction.
Several iterations later, our product had met pivotal user needs: agents could track their clients’ insurance status through a simple interface; renewal of “dec pages” only took four button presses.
Communicating the usefulness of our product was a more interesting challenge.
I conducted user interviews, and the results echoed my own opinion: our landing page felt generic and opaque; insurance agents could scroll through our entire site (they didn’t) and still not understand the product offering, much less trust their livelihood to our services.
In short, we needed to gain user trust.
My content solution focused on two elements: product screenshots and strong testimonials.
This is how I advocated my rationale to senior stakeholders:
- Our core service declutters an insurance agent’s job; our new product interface is free of clutter – we should display product screenshots prominently.
- We can encourage purchase decisions by helping users understand what they’re buying. Showing product screenshots makes our product tangible.
- For a product with a wide-ranging target audience, testimonials aren’t very effective – they tend to speak to a certain slice of the audience. But our target audience is exclusively insurance industry professionals, this adds significant weight to testimonials by their peers.
- Collecting testimonials isn’t costly. We can reach out to our existing user base and offer a small incentive, if they could take some time and record a product feedback – we already do this for user interviews. However, unlike for interviews, we can give prompts that would result in positive feedback.
Stakeholders agreed with my rationale, and we set out to improve the landing page.
We showed numerous product screenshots immediately below the fold:
We also added a testimonial page, filled to the brim with user stories. All stories were accompanied by videos which, upon our request, our users kindly made; insurance agents from all across the country spoke into the webcam about their positive experiences with our service:
These measures lifted conversion significantly. Additionally, I conducted further user interviews (focusing on the landing page) after deployment, and feedback regarding trustworthiness and comprehension of product features was much more positive.