Acquire Demo

Digitizing the life insurance industry

Operating between carriers, agents, and policyholders, Sureify builds and whitelabels web-apps for life insurance carriers. One such product, LifetimeAcquire™, focuses on the application process—involving five distinct workflows and many different edge-cases.

In this project, our goal was to do a massive overhaul for the Acquire product—involving our new design system, brand new features, and major consideration to usability.

Designed with DJ Mackintosh, built with Nav Badheka (Interim PM), Pooja Rao (Product Owner), Wasib Mohammed (Developer), and Nancy Bush (VP Pre-sales).

Project goals

1. Build a clickable demo; i.e., an actual webpage that Sales could use for product demos.
2. Upgrade to sureUI; LifetimeAcquire™ hadn’t seen a significant update since sureUI (our design system) was released.
3. Prototype new features; Sales had been selling the idea of new features, but they hadn’t truly been fleshed out yet.

Navigating a new design paradigm

Typically, design work at Sureify was scoped by either the product team or a client team. However, this project was issued to the demo team—and it created an entirely different paradigm for us (as designers).

High levels of agency

Without a traditional PM, it was on us (as designers) to be decisive & set the groundwork for new iterations of LifetimeAcquire™.

Our work was exploratory. It was scrappy. We took rough ideas, and molded them into a working prototype. We drafted tickets as we learned to navigate our constraints.

Quick turnarounds

Specs were drafted week-by-week, constraints were tight, and iteration needed to be rapid. Additionally, everything we designed needed to be quick for our dev team to implement.

4 main workflows

I worked very closely on this project with another designer, DJ Mackintosh. Together, we built 4 distinct workflows for desktop + mobile viewports.

Quote form for policyholders

A straightforward, 2-page form for prospective policyholders to receive a brief quote.

Agent tooling

A 1-page tool, formatted for power-users. Intended for agents who generate quotes on a routine basis.

Application Form

After receiving a quote, users then fill out an extended application form.

OnTrack™ & eDelivery

Once an application is submitted, it needs to go through underwriting before approval. OnTrack™ coordinates this process.

Upgrading to sureUI

As we adjusted to the demo paradigm, our initial task was to refresh existing screens with the new sureUI design system. In the first few weeks, we laid the groundwork for the layout, look, and feel of the new experience.

Managing complex form fields

Pretty quickly, we ran into our first major hurdle—sureUI hadn’t yet encountered the complex form fields necessary for insurance applications.

Sentence-length labels

sureUI’s form fields were conceived for simple input (e.g. a login form). However, insurance forms often ask sentence-length questions, with necessary context behind them. This meant our existing components were woefully unequipped.

Developer constraints

An early solution I proposed was to use alternative field components—namely, ones that use box-fill styling (as seen in Material-UI). However, due to tight deadlines + a more novice dev team, we needed to work with what we had.

In response

I designed a system of wrapper components, which separate the field label into a separate hierarchy. These satisfied both design and development constraints.

OnTrack™: A multi-user dashboard

The idea behind OnTrack™ and e-Delivery was to give all parties involved (in underwriting) a shared dashboard to track its progress.

What is underwriting?

At this stage of an insurance application, a number of documents (i.e. requirements) are written, passed around, and signed.

The problem: it gets confusing

With multiple parties involved, it gets difficult to see how far along the process is, who is responsible for what, etc.

The solution: a pizza tracker!

Sales realized that our clients needed a product/feature that addressed this issue. Something like... a pizza tracker? This idea formed the basis for the OnTrack™ dashboard, and is where DJ & I started our ideation.