Aviva is the largest general insurer and a leading life and pensions provider in the United Kingdom. A large portion of Aviva's business is generated by third-party intermediaries (brokers and financial advisers) therefore Aviva is very motivated to make it as easy as possible for these intermediaries to do business with Aviva.
Before this project started, the online experience for these intermediaries was a disjointed mix of outdated websites, trading platforms, online tools and calculators. In addition to providing a poor user experience, these channels sat on legacy platforms that are costing the business a lot of money to maintain.
Aviva initiated a project to transform the online experience for intermediaries. This included a consolidation of Aviva's intermediary online presence under a new brand as well as a redesign and replatforming of websites, tools, and calculators.
I was responsible for the design of the new websites accessible before an intermediary signs into their account. This included product information pages, document libraries, online resources, tools and calculators.
I joined the project in slightly difficult circumstances. The project had already started a few months prior to my arrival and was experiencing some difficulties. I was brought in to replace the existing designer who was moving on from the project. Putting extra pressure on the design team to get designs out as quickly as possible was the fact that a development team had already been assembled and was incurring costs to the project. In addition to this, the project wasn't getting input from end users. This was because the project was initially viewed as more of a re-platforming exercise rather than a re-design and the expectation in large was to recreate the existing but make it look better.
These issues posed a real risk to the success of the project so I worked with stakeholders to address them. I highlighted the risk of delivering something that wasn't fit for purpose if we didn't get user input. Weighing this against the scope, budget and timeframes of the project it was agreed that we would get user feedback to refine designs but we wouldn't do in-depth generative user research as there wasn't the budget or the time. Sometimes we need to be practical and "not let great get in the way of good".
To address the issue of the development team sitting idly waiting for designs, the design team worked with product owners to identify low-risk items that we could feed to the development team quickly. These included pages, tools and CMS components that we were fairly confident would only require minimal or no tweaks following user testing of the designs.
We delivered designs for three new intermediary websites unified under a new brand and new B2B visual identity for Aviva. This included designs for various pages and templates, resource libraries, tools and calculators.
One of the first tasks was to tidy and align the information architecture of Aviva's three main intermediary websites (Broker, Adviser, Health Adviser). These sites would initially remain separate however their information architectures needed to be aligned as there were long-term ambitions to eventually merge them into a single site for intermediaries.
The information architectures were developed from card-sorts with internal subject matter experts and then refined using online tree-tests with sample users from a panel of Aviva intermediaries.
At the time of this project, Aviva was also in the process of updating its customer-facing websites. As part of this, the design team had been developing a new digital design framework including a style guide, CMS component library, accessibility and other guidelines.
This framework was a valuable asset for our project as it helped streamlined the design process for us. Once we had worked through design inputs such as business drivers, user goals and existing pain points, we were able to create wireframes and prototypes very quickly for user testing and refinement.
Some early feedback we received from our intermediaries was that they did not like the "consumer" aesthetic of the existing intermediary sites. They felt that this branding did not reflect the professional nature of their relationship with Aviva. Wanting to address this issue while still leveraging the existing design framework, we decided to create a new muted and less vibrant B2B colour scheme for us to use on our sites.
Where we needed to create or modify design components we would work with the team maintaining the design framework to determine whether the changes could be made to the framework or whether we would build something bespoke for our project.
Getting access to end users was not a straight forward task. Brokers and advisers are busy people and generate a lot of business for Aviva so we had to be careful to make sure we weren't seen as wasting their time. We had a dedicated person on the project set up and manage a panel of brokers and advisers that we could call on for user testing.
When design iterations were ready, we ran moderated usability tests using simple click-though InVision prototypes. Given how busy brokers and advisers are, we had to run our tests remotely. The results of these tests were shared with the team and together we decided what changes we'd make to the next iteration of the designs.
When I first joined Aviva I sometimes found using the design system to be a little constraining. At times it felt like I was just assembling components rather than actually designing anything however, working on this project helped me appreciate just how valuable it is to have a good design system to leverage.
Having a design system with best-practice already baked-in meant we could quickly create designs under tight project timeframes and it also meant that we could focus our design efforts on the more challenging design problems as well as issues revealed during user testing.
Disciplined use of the design system across all projects meant that end-users benefitted from a much more consistent experience across Aviva's different websites, addressing one of the key issues with the disparate intermediary websites that existed before this project.
Something that worked very well for this project were the weekly design show and tell sessions we held with a wide range of project stakeholders. It was a great way to keep everyone updated with progress, get feedback early, and identify technical issues that might impact the viability of our designs.
I much preferred running these separate design show and tells rather than sharing designs in sprint reviews. It gave us more flexibility over how often we shared designs instead of being held to sprint cycles. It also meant that we didn't have to compete for time with the development team presenting their work, which from my experience on other projects often ran over time. Finally it also meant that stakeholders didn't have to context-shift between reviewing the outputs of the development team, which should be robust and working as designed and specified, versus designs that could be at any stage of the design process and therefore could be exploratory and still have many gaps.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
