The UX claims team I led consisted of the following roles:

• two UX researchers

• one UX content writer

• three UX designers

• one UX designer specializing in interaction design

As the UX team lead across all claims products, I was responsible for guiding the creation and evolution of all customer and internal associate facing experiences. The team designed products enabling electronic first notice of loss (eFNOL) for auto claims, eFNOL for property claims, and the tracking of a claim’s progress. The ability to track a claim was a completely new customer facing capability that provided visibility into a claim’s progress from initial submission through final payout. All three of these products also had digital counterparts enabling associates to facilitate the first notice of loss process and track a claim’s progress

Before I came to Nationwide I had the unique experience of transitioning UX work from a third party consultancy and bringing that design work in-house. This experience taught me about the technical and logistical complexities involved, but more importantly the sensitive nature of the situation as work is transitioned away from a group that designed the products from the ground up. I spent my first six months at Nationwide working with Deloitte to transition UX ownership of a subset of claims products to my team at Nationwide. Some key transition items included:

• weekly update communications

• stakeholder touchpoint share outs

• business partner strategy sessions

• all scrum team ceremonies

• design reviews with product and business

I also worked with Deloitte to ensure that their previous two years of product knowledge and deliverables were thoroughly documented and understood by the Nationwide UX team.

Nationwide UX had fallen into a support role for the consulting group Deloitte over the course of multiple years, and the majority of the design team was unfamiliar with what directly supporting a dev team looked like within the organization. Developers, business partners, and the product team were also unaware of how to best utilize an in-house fully allocated UX design team. I established many recurring practices including:

• Design reviews internal to UX

• Working sessions with the product team and business partners facilitated by UX

• Backlog groomings focused on product team roadmap alignment

• Integrating the UX team into established scrum ceremonies: planning, backlog grooming, sprint demos, end of sprint design reviews and sign off

I also introduced UX content and research representation into team design reviews to ensure that as work progressed the strategy for content and research was considered and reassessed regularly. I also worked with the scrum team in coordinating and facilitating a two day team building workshop to acclimate the group to this new team composition and give everyone the opportunity to express ideas to strengthen the team moving forward.  I also owned and maintained planning across multiple lines of business, multiple products, known dependencies, and multiple spans of time. This continuous plan ownership and socialization was integral to the UX claims team’s success. 

The communication touch points with customers across the claims experience at Nationwide were fragmented and inconsistent both from a content perspective and visual presentation. Each product had a unique communications identity and approach. I led the UX team in evaluating all existing claims communications, identifying gaps and excessive communication, and devising a strategic framework for communications moving forward. This wholistic redesign included:

• Email communications

• Texting communications

• Call center scripts

Claims had a robust content strategy across digital products and this was the opportunity to realize that strategy within all communications. Multiple efforts enabled the UX team to complete this work:

• Heuristic evaluation and inventory of all existing claim communications

• Journey mapping of all claims experiences identifying existing communications and identifying opportunities for new communications

• Design sprint focusing on communication design and presentation

• Call center shadowing

The Nationwide claims digital ecosystem presented many opportunities for tighter product integration. Some improvement efforts I led the UX team through included:

• Introducing multiple opportunities and incentives for the user to continue to the claim tracker once they had completed the first notice of loss experience. Analytics showed a steep decline in users that checked on the status of their claim after filing in moderated testing, indicating a general lack of awareness of the tool. Through the promotion of claim tracker at the conclusion of first notice of loss, and the introduction of convenient click through UI elements, the team was able to increase tracker utilization by 30%.

The UX and product teams had identified a strong candidate for a redesign, the property first notice of loss experience. This effort was 36 months out on the product roadmap, but preliminary UX moderated and unmoderated research efforts along with analytics indicated a strong need to refresh the experience. Issues ranged from basic usability issues, lack of functionality before transitioning to an associate, and slow performance. With the support of the product team UX lead the charge to create a business case to fund this work. The first step was socializing MVP and goal state proposals including timelines and ultimately design concepts