Folio - Insurance Concierge
BACKGROUND
Amitree was looking for new ways to monetize the home buyers that were using Folio with their agents during the home buying process. My design partner and I researched this area to understand the home insurance process, the agent's involvement, and any unaddressed pains Folio might solve.
MY ROLE
Research and product design
NEED & CHALLENGE
The main goal of this research project was to answer the question: Should Amitree build a home insurance feature? This product was competing with other business ideas, so the founders wanted more information to help with their decision.
RESEARCH
Our first step was to hold a workshop. These are great to understand the business goals, stakeholder questions and assumptions and ideas we would need to include in our research.
After the goals workshop, we had a design charette to generate possible ideas for the home insurance product. These would be used to guide the discussion for the research interviews to help us better understand the needs of the customer. We choose which ideas to explore by plotting those that we thought had value and were easy to build.
Next, we interviewed buyers who were in the process of closing on a home. We asked them questions about their home insurance decision and then asked them to rank various ideas to help us understand the needs and pain points during the decision process.
Above is a 2 x 2 matrix which helps us understand which ideas high have the potential for high impact (value) and are easier to build (cost).
We shared 4 different concepts to research participants: an insurance cheat sheet, insurance quote comparison, recommendations from agents, and talking with an insurance expert. The cheat sheet was a clear winner.
The cheat sheet was a winner, but many didn't know how the information would get there. We knew we could get access to some of it through public APIs, but would agents help fill out the rest? Sensing a pain point for both agents and clients, we surveyed agents to ask how often clients request property details for home insurance.
TEST & VALIDATE
The cheat sheet concept had the most interest, but would people really engage with one? To validate this, we created a fake "cheat sheet" that included details about the property the buyer was closing on. We sent this to twenty agents and their buyers. Surprisingly, agents filled in a lot of information, and engagement with the cheat sheet was very high for buyers.
Insights from the test:
• Home details and coverage content helped buyers prepare for their call when getting quotes.
• 50% used the cheat sheet multiple times and referred to it when getting quotes.
• Searching for contact info on the cheat sheet was easier than googling each provider and finding contact info on their own.
• The cheat sheet built trust between the agent and client and elevated the service beyond what the client expected.
Above, a quick prototype was made to test engagement on a "cheat sheet" between agents and their clients before we invested in building one.
FINAL DESIGN & HARD DECISIONS
The final design that we validated with users incorporated the insurance cheat sheet into the existing buyer timeline. It provided many details about the property the buyer was purchasing from agents and APIs and gave them helpful information to understand their coverage needs.
In the end, we decided not to build the home insurance product. The cheatsheet was useful to buyers and gave agents an extra level of service that they could provide to their clients -- but it didn't bring us closer to monetizing the sale of insurance. We decided to focus on other products that we all felt would have more impact on the business.
