Reimagining insurance with design thinking
Senior Product Designer @ Blackboard Insurance 2018 – 2020
Summary
Responsibilities
- Leading design work on internal and external enterprise software applications.
- Leading user research in collaboration with product manager.
- Workshop and design sprint facilitation
- Partnering with cross-functional peers to conceptualize and build enterprise software products
Problem
Blackboard Insurance was reimagining the entire commercial insurance experience with a customer-centric, technology-forward and data-driven approach. The core of Blackboard’s offering was to build technologically strong and innovative platforms that handle everything from underwriting, claims, broker portfolios, analytics dashboard, and more.
Solution
My design work was primarily focused on our underwriting platform, our claims platform, as well as our internal operations and workflow management tools. Due to specific privacy concerns, I am not able to share a lot of details about these projects on this online portfolio, but I’m happy to discuss the projects more in detail if requested specifically.
Project Highlights
Workflow Management
We designed and built a workflow management tool to administer users, permissions and rules for our suite of applications. In addition, this tool also was designed to manage and support workflows for different user types. I was the Lead Designer on this project and I was actively engaged from conceptualization through implementation.
Broker Portfolio
We conceptualized and designed a broker portfolio application for our broker partners. The goal was to give brokers insights into submission and policy status, claims, and direct communications with Blackboard. I was the Lead Designer on this project and my activities included running design sprints with stakeholders, doing user testing and presenting the solution to the leadership at Blackboard and the broker partners.
Underwriting Software
Underwriting is at the core of an insurance carrier’s responsibilities. We needed to change how underwriting was being done in an innovative solution. To support this, we built out an underwriting platform that heavily integrates 3rd-party data from various sources, empowers the underwriters to make informed decisions and manages submissions and policies.
Claims Resolution
We needed to bring claims in-house at Blackboard and for that we decided to build out an application that would make claims resolution machine-augmented, intuitive and accessible for claims handlers.
The application handles everything from loss and policy information, to financials and payments, to litigation management.
Design process
Lean & Experimental
The design process at Blackboard covers discovery through implementation. This process follows the basic steps of design thinking witha particular emphasis on iterative prototyping and experimentation to validate ideas quickly and early. Our process works like this:
Gather input through observations, listening, comments or feedback.
Synthesize the input to identify where we will go next and what we need to create.
Create an artifact/prototype using the appropriate level of fidelity.
Communicate the artifact we created, through the appropriate channel and to the appropriate audience to gather further input.