Designing a digital home-insurance experience from scratch
A major East African insurer, a traditional legacy player, was building a brand-new, API-driven way for people to take out and claim home insurance online. Taking out a policy or making a claim had meant a branch visit or an agent and slow, manual paperwork. With no existing experience to build on, customer research and journey mapping shaped a digital onboarding and claims journey designed around how people actually behave.
- Client
- A leading East African insurerA traditional, legacy insurer in East Africa with several lines of business, with this project focused on home insurance (anonymised at the client's request)
- Role
- Customer experience specialist
- Timeline
- 6 months
Everything was manual. To take out home insurance or make a claim, customers had to go into a branch or deal with an agent, and claims in particular were slow and complex. This traditional, legacy insurer was now creating something entirely new: a digital, API-driven way to take out and claim home insurance from wherever they are. There was nothing to build on, and the organisation was process-first with low UX maturity, so the product risked being shaped by internal systems rather than by how customers actually behave. The work had to bridge the technical, the API and internal processes, with the behavioural, how people really take out and claim insurance.
A traditional legacy insurer was moving home insurance online for the first time, taking onboarding and claims out of the branch and into a new digital channel. With nothing to iterate on, the whole customer experience had to be designed from scratch, and designed around the customer rather than the back office.
- Ran customer research to understand how people actually take out home insurance and make a claim
- Mapped how people actually took out and claimed home insurance, from branch visits and agent dealings to the paperwork behind a claim
- Worked through the internal processes and the API to understand what the product could and had to support
- Designed the onboarding and claims experience around customer behaviour, bridging the technical and the behavioural
- Brought customer and experience thinking into a process-first, waterfall organisation with low UX maturity
- A digital onboarding experience that let customers take out home insurance wherever they are
- A self-service claims experience: customers could start a claim themselves by taking and submitting photos, with an agent stepping in to cross-check, instead of beginning the whole process in a branch or through an agent
- An experience shaped around how people actually buy and claim, built on top of the API-driven backend
When there is nothing to iterate on, you start from how people behave, not from how the back office works.
- A first-of-its-kind digital home-insurance experience for the insurer, covering both onboarding and claims
- Manual, paperwork-heavy processes replaced by a clearer digital journey, with manual processing down 20% within three months
- Customers received their claims faster than before
- Customer behaviour placed at the centre of a product that would otherwise have been shaped by internal process
- The new experience was championed by the company's CEO
- In a process-first business with low UX maturity, introducing customer thinking matters as much as the design itself
- Designing a brand-new experience means starting from behaviour, not from the back-office process or the API