Case Study 5: Self Service Forms
Company: New York Life | Year: 2020 | Type: Customer Support
Bounce Rate
-48.82%
Between 2017 and 2018, bounce rate decreased from 62.27% to 14.45% as a result of Policy Owners having access to self-service options on the site.
Traffic
+2.80%
Overall traffic based on unique visitors In 2017 amounted to 16,767. 2018 in contrast had a lift in traffic with unique visitors totaling 17,237.
Page Events
+2,196
Between 2017 to 2018, page events went from 0 to 2,196. This is a direct result of the newly implemented self-service options available for Policy owners.
Background
New York Life has and still utilizes a fully dedicated Customer Service Support team to assist and support its Policy Owners with services ranging from answering questions, filing/updating beneficiary information, processing transactions, and filing claims for dependents who have lost a loved one.
Because of the high call volume related with the aforementioned services, New York Life’s CSR team was and is not able to keep up with its Policy Owner demands. As a result, the company had undertaken steps to modernize its technology stack to provide digital channels to service its clients complimentary to its functioning CSR team.
As Director of UX, my team was brought on to identify our Services Team’s pain points and to then propose UX solutions that would help their team manage additional incoming Policy holder requests through a more intuitive web experience.
Identifying/Auditing Design Problems
Prior to the redesign, the section in which the forms were listed out were not structured within any specific table format. It was difficult to tell for users to identify the separation between forms.
• All of the primary and secondary links were tucked under the fold.
• Primary and secondary links were not placed in a cohesive, structured manner. Some links were positioned on the left whilst others were placed to the side of the page.
• Proper requirements gathering was not conducted and thus, the positioning of links did not reflect the needs of the business/CSR team.
• Self Service (digital channel) did not exist and needed to be added in.
• User research was not conducted, which led to lengthy development processes and reducing cost-effectiveness - the project was postponed on multiple occasions.
UX/Interaction Design
Visual Design
The function in which users have to type in their policy number and select their state was visually not ADA compliant and as a result, gave users with visual impairment difficult to interact with the form.
Visual treatment did not hold consistency with the design system placed in.
• Visual treatment did not hold consistency with the design system placed in.
• Photography took large amount of real estate whilst not reflecting branding guidelines.
• ADA compliance (WCAG 2.0) was not considered, increasing risk of litigation.
• Color contrast fell under 4.5:1.
• Lack of consistency with regards to font-size usage for headings.
Interaction Swim Lane
Before we began to even conceptualize on sketching out ideas, we first had to get a better understanding of the overall flow or funnel a user (Policy Owner) had to go through. We did not want to only solve for stand-alone pages but make the overall interaction flow more intuitive and simple to reduce the amount of steps and clicks a Policy Owner would need to take to get to their relevant form. Thus, we committed to an audit to measure the click depth and then propose something far more simpler.
Current Set Up
Considerations:
• User is a Policy Owner.
• User starts the journey through the homepage.
What We Found:
As it turns out, for something as simple as having a Policy Owner access their appropriate form took was a cumbersome process, totaling:
• 6 actions.
• 5 clicks.
• 1 text entry where the user types in their appropriate Policy number.
Proposal
We collected the current amount of clicks and steps that the current design had forced users to take and proposed a more simplified solution.
• We were able to set the total number of actions/clicks to 3, reducing the length of the user’s journey by half.
Conceptual Sketches
Once we’ve shared our findings/audit with Key Stakeholder(s) and collected business requirements/objectives from them, we began to ideate through iterative sketches.
Final Look and Feel
Once we’ve ideated several solutions and ideas, we’ve selected the two best ones to begin giving our sketch a polished look and feel whilst prepping it for our usability testing. Although it’s not shown here, the two options were similar — one option would show the description of the form and the “Call / Mail or Fax” options on page load whilst the other option would tuck the description and the “Call / Mail or Fax” options on page load.
• In the redesign, we cleaned the list of forms and placed them in a structured table component whilst making prominent the three pieces of CTAs (in priority order) visually clear and distinguishable for users.
• We were able to remove much of the content that existed within the right rail and placed the ones the business still had wanted to keep tucked under the main set of functionalities.
Usability Testing
We had two options to test — what was current and what we’ve been able to draft up. We proceeded with creating a quick usability test to validate our design decisions. Due to time sensitivity, we recruited Participants from throughout the organization who were not familiar with interacting with the Service Forms section of our site.
Based on discussions we’ve had with Key Stakeholder(s), we were able to select a moderated, one-to-one usability test with 7 participants. Within the tests, we collected time completion rates, success / error rates, and some qualitative data that reflected the user’s interpretation of task difficulty.
What we’ve learned from the tests:
• Participants preferred having the description of the Form, all primary and secondary CTAs displayed on page load.
• Participants were able to clearly identify and differentiate between the three primary CTAs — Self-Service, Call, and Mail or Fax.
• The Mail or Fax functionalities being tucked under a tooltip helped users get to the other primary CTAs.