Insurance agents grow their business from client relationships: new and existing. They operate individually using resources provided by New York Life as a supplement to support their business. Agents need an accessible, simple but robust tool to access on the go, in the field, or for admin purposes in the office. The tool needs to cater to agents both new and experienced, providing smart suggestions to continually evolve their business.  

Team
This project was a proof of concept and was completed in 6 weeks. The design team: Group Creative Director, Chris Stauch; Associate Creative Director, Adrian Valencia-Folk; Senior UX designer, Amir Doleh; Visual designer and UX designer, Allie Jernigan . We worked closely with the business team onsite at NYL to better understand the users and the bigger picture of the product at hand. We also consulted the engineer team to align on system capabilities. 
 

My Role
I was the lead visual designer on this project. I developed a design language that adheres to New York Life's brand guidelines, using their color palate and typefaces, Alda and Effra. My goal was to create a clean and organized interface through use of color, typographic hierarchy, white space, and other visuals cues to lead the user through the data/content. The combination of serif/san serif helped delineate between headlines, primary information and data. Instead of using a card based framework, space and typographic hierarchy was utilized to define content sections.

I set up a style guide and master library in sketch with reusable components, symbols, and type styles for my team to easily collaborate and design consistent mockups. With a short turnaround and tight timeline, this effort increased our productivity, efficiency and overall quality of work.

I helped brainstorm with the team to push the overall experience further and came up with the concept of using a contextual based feed for the dashboard. I took on the Growth Forecast page, iterating on a previous ux designer's version to create a more compelling, impactful, and usable tool for our end user (see mini case study below for more detail).

After talking with the business, I pushed for the idea of having a "knowledge base" within the feed for the newer agents just getting started that need tips for growing their business and education on the industry. For the power users, this would provide a way to surface new regulations or standards put in place. This would be relevant to the user, providing information that will continually evolve their practice and help increase New York Life's agent retention rate, one of the KPIs. 

Lastly, I improved the overall ux and designed each module on the dashboard/feed.

Outcome
We transformed the current Salesforce CRM by creating a tool that is user centered to increase agents' business and their personal growth. The experience is intuitive and human; it understands and communicates to agents on their level. We designed a simple and organized interface to bring focus to the information and data.     

Scope

Dashboard / Feed

Narrative
The day-to-day of an agent and their staff is understandably complicated. They leverage a suite of tools on a near constant rotation. As a front page to a large amount of these tools, the dashboard should pay off a healthy tension between overview and detail.

Our agent, Harriet, is just starting her day, and is looking for a rundown of her practice’s activity.

Practice at a glance
Harriet can see a retrospective of all activity at a practice level. 

Details on demand
Whether by individual client or a larger client group, Harriet can filter in order to drive to pointed metrics.

A preview of next steps
Harriet’s practice has quite a few clients that all exist in various stages in their financial goals, a glance-able list of both readouts and actionable tasks helps her and her team stay on top their client’s needs.

Fresh opportunities
New leads, as well as opportunities to grow existing clients are bubbled up on the dashboard, fed from both manual earmarking by Harriet and her team, and automatic data insights.

Progress towards goals
Harriet can see a ledger that tracks her practices’ progress toward various councils.

Lead & Upsell Management

Narrative
Crucial to practice growth, lead management is a critically important task for Harriet and her team. Just below the surface of the team’s dashboard sits a set of robust lead management tools.

Qualified Leads
Harriet’s practice can clearly and easily see new leads as they come in, and are provided additional organization tools to help them differentiate between curated qualified leads, and pointed suggestions from RightBridge.

New opportunities with current clients
Because new sales opportunities can exist with current clients, Harriet needs a tool that can surface these along with new client leads, without losing improtant insight to her existing clients.

Powerful search and filtering
Powerful data faceting factors in prominently, allowing Harriet’s practice to re-sort and re-visualize leads to view them against trends, industries, services, etc.

Intelligent tagging
Harriet has a team of capable agents working with her practice, and she needs to be able to delegate follow ups accordingly. Tagging and lead assignment lets her and her team work quicker and in a more agile fashion.

Insights
With specific leads and opportunities, Harriet can see industry insights as they might pertain to her business, existing clients, or growth goals.

Growth Forecast Iteration

After internally reviewing the initial concept created for the Growth Forecast page, I felt it could be pushed further. The content hierarchy lacked information prioritization and the grouping of information wasn’t clearly communicating the intended message. The layout structure, interaction and graph hid insightful data. I wanted to explore alternative graphs to deliver useful and impactful information that resonates best with agents.

Opportunity Management

Narrative
Harriet and her team know that new opportunities, as well as the growth of their current clients portfolios, are important and complex endeavors. They need a dedicated kanban view that lets them easily track the progress of open tasks.

Organized by status
Carrying over from existing tools, a status based kanban view is a clean and proven way of viewing tasks.

Filtering and badging to narrow focus
Harriet’s practice can get additional value from a kanban view by using badges, tags and filters to narrow the board to parameters such as new leads, Whole life opportunities, etc.

Pulls and feeds into existing clients/leads
Changes made in the kanban view should be reflected in client profiles, leads lists, et al, in order to prevent duplicate or conflicting information. e.g. if a lead is moved to the “closed” swim lane, it will automatically come off the Qualified Leads list.

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