Streamlining a car insurance buying experience using
UX Research
As a UX designer on the Turners Cars project, I was responsible for improving the car insurance buying experience for customers who had recently purchased a vehicle.
By conducting UX research and designing solutions based on our findings, we were able to streamline the process and make it more intuitive for users.
Customers can now easily navigate to the car insurance section of the website, compare insurance options, and make an informed decision without feeling frustrated.
The new experience also allows customers to purchase car insurance online without the need to request a call back from a sales staff member.
This not only enhances the customer experience, but also helps to reduce the demand for customer service and the workload for sales staff, ultimately benefiting the business as a whole
Explore the Prototype
Go on, have a play!
THE PROBLEM TACKLED
Overview
Turners Car Auctions is a market leader in the automotive industry in New Zealand, responsible for more than 10% of all used vehicle sales in the country. It has retained its original function as a vehicle auctioneer, operating in 19 branches nationwide, but has become increasingly dependent on a parallel role as a conventional used vehicle dealership. In support of that role, it has established in- house finance and vehicle insurance divisions that allow it to offer buyers a complete “one-stop shop” experience.
Challenge
Turners Cars is undertaking a re-design of its motor vehicle insurance systems and processes, including an investigation of ways in which the introduction of new technologies can enhance the buyer experience.
The team was tasked to re-design the motor vehicle insurance section of the website and the purchasing experience. From a user experience perspective, how can we best meet the needs of a motor vehicle insurance customer?
Role
Role: UX/UI Designer
Timeline: 3 weeks.
Devices: Desktop Website
Team: Myself and UX Designer Cory Cannings. In addition we worked alongside 3 developers who provided us with feedback on design feasibility.
Contribution
Throughout the project, Cory and I collaborated closely on UX research and Usability testing. As a stronger UI designer I championed the creation of the design system, wireframes and Hi-fi prototype in Figma with Cory's assistance.
_edited.jpg)
THE PROCESS
Using a design thinking approach
This project was more than re-designing the car insurance section of the website to be more minimal & aesthetic. It was about how we could address real pain points of customers during the car insurance buying experience with Turners Cars while making a positive impact towards helping the company achieve its business goals. To help us achieve this we approached solving the problem using design thinking.
EMPATHISE & DEFINE
Getting insights from stakeholders
As one of my first tasks of the project, stakeholder interviews were conducted to help build user personas and to get insights to define the problem we are solving and ultimately inform our design solutions. Together the UX team, we prepared an interview script with open-ended questions for our interview with a user and our interview with the business manager.
Our user interview questions focused on learning & understanding the user's experience, thoughts, motivations, pain points and behaviours.We had the opportunity to conduct an interview with 1 user. The user learnings from the interview were recorded in the form of an empathy map and were used to help define problems the user experienced during their customer journey.
Our stakeholder interview questions with the business manager focused on learning and understanding the context of the problem, what business objective is our work intended to address, what problem will this solve for the customers, how we know if we have succeeded and what vision do they have for the project.
Meet our proto persona: 'Chris The Family Man'
Cory and created Proto personas to better understand the user and empathise with them and their current experience. I utilised the analytic tool Similarweb to help uncover user data of the Turner website to define who the main user is. I conducted further research on NZ car insurance purchasers to get a deeper understanding of demographics and behaviours. I used this data and assumptions to create a proto-persona 'Chris the Family Man' to best reflect the core user persona. Cory and I created a few different proto-persona options but settled on Chris the Family man as our research suggested this persona represented the core user group. The user persona helped influence our customer journey map by reflecting on Chris's motivations and pain points and further assisted us when creating out Problem Statement.
Click to make image larger
Uncovering Gems Along The User Journey
Next we created a customer journey map to build a better understanding of how customers engage with the company. It helped map out in a visual storyline the users processes, needs and perceptions of buying car insurance through Turners to help us discover opportunities for improvement.
We examined the steps a customer goes through after purchasing a car to becoming a car insurance policy holder.
It was clear that the users perception of the process of buying insurance from Turners was frustrating, time consuming, confusing and overall a painful expereince. This was exciting to us because it meant there were plenty of opportunities to improve the user experience.
The key opportunities identified focused on:
1) how we improve navigation and discoverability of information to make quick informed decisions without having the need of talking to a real person,
2) how we can streamline the application process and
3) introducing a customer portal for account and policy management.
Click to make image larger
Shared Paint Points
Using the information we gathered we put together a Venn diagram to visualise the patterns of pain points of the business and the user to find commonalities. The purpose of this exercise was to help us deduce the main pain points that we may want to address when structuring our problem statement before heading into our ideation session.
Click to make image larger
Defining the scope with a Problem Statement
We created a problem statement to help summarise our user problems, user goals and what needs to be explored to solve the problems. It helps us to define what is within our design scope and the impact our solutions will have on the user and business.
Users of the Turners website such as Chris the Family Man have difficulty navigating the car insurance section of the website. They struggle to intuitively access key relevant information to make informed and confident decisions when purchasing insurance. The current webpage lacks purposeful structure and content, creating a negative experience for Chris.

This is a problem because Chris will be feeling frustrated and isn’t likely to proceed past the consideration phase of the insurance purchasing process. Meaning his new vehicle won’t be covered, risking financial and emotional strain if his new car breaksdown or is involved in an incident. If he becomes fed up he will be inclined to begin researching other car insurance providers.

If this problem isn’t fixed the Turners Sales and Insurance Teams will be overwhelmed with innefficient high work-loads, resulting in less customer satisfaction, low car sale to insurance conversion rates, and potentially loss in yearly revenue for the business.
Sprint planning with User Stories
From our problem statement, we crafted 2 user stories. These were the 2 features/designs that we believed would have the highest value delivered to the stakeholders within the time constraints of the project. I enjoy using user stories because it serves as a collaboration tool with our developers to keep everyone connected with the user and give a shared understanding of how our work will deliver value to the user.
User story #1
As someone who has just purchased a new car from Turners and is a potential Turners Car Insurance purchaser...
I want to be able to intuitively navigate the Turners Car Insurance webpage and have the information presented to me so that I understand my options, reducing the number of questions I have...
so that I can simply and quickly make an informed decision and begin my insurance application.
User story #2
As someone who is about to apply for car insurance through Turners...
I want to seamlessly connect my quotation into an application, and have all relevant information presented to me in an easily digestible manner...
so that I save time and clearly understand what I am purchasing.
Getting A clear picture on navigation issues
We reflected on the current information architecture of the Turners Cars website. We mapped out the current website noting the key pages and interactions that are part of the car insurance section of the website. This helped me to learn how many steps it takes to get to key web pages and where users experience difficulties in navigation and finding information.
Something we recognised immediately is the difficulty to navigate to the car insurance section of the website from the homepage. Nestled under Finance & Insurance we hypothesised that by making Car Insurance a Level 1 instead of a Level 2 it would become much more discoverable for our users.
IDEATION
Creating a new Flow
Using insights from mapping out the current website and user flow we began our solution ideation by creating a new user flow.
Current user flow
User Flow Brainstorm
New User Flow
By focusing on our UX research findings we were able to improve the user flow by:
1) improving the ease of navigation to the car insurance section by making Car Insurance a Level 1 in the website map.
2) Eliminating unnecessary steps to get more information about car insurance policies and access FAQs.
3) Streamlining the application process by having the ability to get an online quote and purchase car insurance online.
Sketching and Wireframing
We used the Crazy-8 method to quickly brainstorm design solutions for the first page of the Turners Cars car insurance section of the website. Each design provided different features and layout options for information.
Consistent elements among our designs was a hero section, comparison table, FAQs as an accordian, clear buttons with call to actions, and a section for the support options. Other features we liked included a testimonials section and alternating content section to feature benefits.
We did not choose one sketch to move forwards with, rather we combined the features and layout we believed helped. I used these sketches to create the wireframes.
​
After the crazy-8 session, We began creating the wireframes in Figma. This helped bring clarity to the project, allowing us to work through all the interactions and layout needs. I chose Low Fidelity Wireframes for this stage of the project to allow for speed and to move on to getting feedback from the development team on the feasibility of the design solution.
We were proud to find opportunities to include cross-selling insurance add-ons and upselling more than one policy.
DELIVERY
Putting the Prototype to the test
Once we were happy with our wireframes they were sent to the field for testing with great initial results. We created a usability test plan with 7 scenario tasks and began recruiting participants aiming to test the prototype against people who closely matched our proto-persona. Cory and I took turns moderating the usability test and observing to take notes.
Test. Iterate. Test. Iterate.
We ran a total of 4 tests, divided them into 2 rounds and completed 2 rounds of prototype iterations.
We observed 18 usability issues. We prioritised the usability issues observed based on 'Jakob Nielson's Severity Ratings'.
We addressed our usability issues with a severity rating of 3 first and found we had enough time to visit the usability issues with lower severity ratings within the time constraints of the project. In total, we achieved implemented16 design iterations.
​
User story #1
16 usability issues observed
User story #2
2 usability issues observed
Below I have featured a handful of examples of the type of usability issues we observed.
Improving Usability through Tab Design
An observations from our usbaility testing was that users did not easily recognise that they could access the different insurance policy information by clocking on the tabs along the top. This feature was not an uncommon website design so we were surprised by this finding.
Our solution was to give the classic module tab design bit of a face lift. We kept the functionality but made the tabs appear like buttons. We made these iterations before our second round of usability testing and found that this design change appeared to succesfully address the design issue.
Preventing Navigation Confusion through Scroll Animation
We observed that having a page scroll interaction when someone wanted to learn more about a specific insurance policy was confusing in our first prototype. We had the intentions to keep the user on the same page, isntead of being re-directed to a separate page to obtain this information. What wasn't considered was that having an instant scroll animation it gave the impression that the user had been directed to another page rather than scrolling to another section of the original page.
To prevent this confusion we added a 1 second scroll animation to make it obvious that they were being directed to another section on the same page rather than being redirected to a compleletly new page.
​
We were able to test these changes in our 2nd round of usability tests and were able to validate that this iteration had worked to prevent navigation confusion.
Improving User Experience through Multi-Policy Discount Promotion
During our first round of usability testss we were hearing comments and seeing user frustrations about finding out about the discount for having a multipolicy and not being able to do this in one go.
​
We updated the placement of the multi-policy discount promotion to the last page of the application form and included a button that allowed the user to add another policy to their first application.
​
Heading into our second round of usability tests this change appeared to improve the user experience.
OUTCOME
Results: People liked it.
We’ve had very positive feedback from the people we did our usability testing with. The following quotes are from three different people:
"Feels really intuitive to get to the car insurance section."
"Much better than the current website and getting a quote is easy."
"It’s easier to find information and support".
​
Our investigation into improving the user experience of buying car insurance after purchasing a car with Turners cars showed that more than a minimal aesthetic design was needed. By using our research insights not only were we able to address real pain points of navigating the website but we were able to speed up the decision making process to buy car insurance and streamlined the buying expereience by allowing users to get quotes online and complete the purchase quickly with less conversations and sales staff needed during buyer journey.
No longer will customers be ready to jump ship to a competitor due to feeling frustrated with the website and the slow car insurance buying processes.
23
Min
to your destination
Users are now able to intuitively navigate to the car insurance section of the website, quickly compare insurance options and make an informed decision.
23
Min
to your destination
They can now seamlessly purchase car insurance online without the need of requesting a call back from a sales staff member.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
Next Steps...
We would have liked to carry out further user testing for our last round of iterations if time was not a constraint on this project.
We would have liked to carry out further user testing for our last round of iterations if time was not a constraint on this project.
We would have liked to carry out further user testing for our last round of iterations if time was not a constraint on this project.
One challenge was getting our quote summary and checkout page to be the best experience possible. Because we wanted to make a one-page checkout experience as our research suggested this can help with conversion rates It created some design challenges getting the experience and layout right. Although 3 out of 4 participants were quickly able to locate where to enter payment details we believe there was still some confusion. Because our focus on making the online buying experience seamless and this is an area that I believe can still be improved.
I would love to continually build on the new user experience, I believe further features such as online policy management and customer portals should be explored next.