Aviva Global Corporate Solutions wanted to create a claims and risk portal for their customers (a mix of risk managers, claims specialists and insurance brokers) to simplify the process of checking their company’s insurance data. At the time clients needed to call Aviva each time information was needed, which is then generated as an Excel document and emailed to them.

At the time I started work on this project there were already over 100 very specific requirements created by the product owner and other stakeholders. The team were looking to UX to visualise these requirements.

The first thing I wanted to know was how the requirements had been created and what research had been done. Spending time with the product owner helped to understand that while no formal research was done, the team were very aware of the current system’s failings, what their clients really wanted, and what competitors were offering.

Looking at the requirements and the competitor landscape, and from talking to Aviva employees in the Claims and Risk departments who have daily interactions with the end users, it seemed that a dashboard approach would be the best way to serve this data visualisation information. This would allow users to first access a quick view of their position, before deep diving into the detail.

To verify this I created a set of pen portraits in order to understand what the user journeys would be. I took these journeys around the different teams in Aviva to make sure I fully understood each requirement and how it might be visualised. These workshops were also extremely useful for the stakeholders to refine their ideas and sharpen their own understanding of what they were looking to achieve.

First I sorted the stories into categories, which became the basis of the site’s information architecture.

I then took the stories that required data visualisation and identified the best method of representing each, whether a chart, graph, table, etc.

I held almost daily calls with stakeholders to demonstrate each story as it was visualised. I used a mix of InVision prototypes and flat images to demonstrate, updating the customer journeys as I went along, to give context.

Then I created the page layout wireframes, defining the hierarchy of information using the customer journeys to help understand which information was most important for each page.

The biggest challenge we faced was some way into the project when it became clear that this dashboard would not after all be a standalone portal, but needed to be integrated into the Aviva for Business website. This meant a rethink of the login journey and the entire navigation system. 

I worked with the Aviva Framework team (all new designs need to adhere to this internal design language) and reached a compromise where we were able to use a global masthead navigation for users to access Aviva for Business if needed, allowing for the GCS portal to have its own navigation.

The prototype was presented to a group of 20 clients during a day long session. Feedback was very positive and clients were excited to start using it. 

After the event the Product Owner told me that the heads of Claims and Risk (the main business owners) were initially doubtful that the digital team would be able to produce this portal as it’s so complex, but had been impressed with how quickly I picked it up and were very happy with the progress to date.