Designing the communication platform of an austrian insurance company
Österreichische Sozialversicherung asked from DigitalBeratung to provide UX concepts for the way the customers communicate with the service. Precisely, the task was to design the official inbox and a ‘live chat’ module. The ‘live chat module’ was needed for the clients who were not registered to the official inbox and needed to help from the customer support. We had several discussions to understand the requirements and the legal framework in which insurance companies are allowed to communicate with their customers.
A mockup of the inbox of the user. A live chat module was also designed for users who did not want to register for the digital inbox (one reason was because then they wouldn’t receive letters at their address). Open & closed tickets, different user roles, message categories and legal requirements were some of the issues we had to consider in designing the communication interface with their customers.
UI Mockups of the official inbox. Click on the image to see it in full size.
Expert Review of billareisen.at
I got involved in this project as an external Usability & User Experience expert with the goal to review the design of the travel agency platform. My custom set of heuristics, the perspectives where I focused the most, are described below.
First impression & ambience of the website
How does the customer feel when looking at the homepage or the search results? Is she motivated or indifferent? What kind of (subtle) emotions are evoked from ‘shopping around’? To quote Don Norman:
”Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions. Bad websites have horrible personalities and instil horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly. We need to design things–products, websites, services–to convey whatever personality and emotions are desired.”
Usability
How is the information organised? Where could the user fail to understand what is going on? Is all the information required in the right place for the prospective customer to seriously consider the offers? Moreover, does the Interface make sense - e.g. where the buttons are, the use of filters, UI inconsistencies?
Business Strategy
How does your platform reflect how different and better you are from the competitors? Does your offer seem attractive enough? Why, why not?
Visual Improvements
Feedback on color, fonts, arrangements and layouts, use of white space, icons and visuals in general.
While these were the guiding principles in my mind, my review followed the framework set by Digitalberatung, labelling each issue as a “Showstopper”, “Important Problem”, “Minor Problem”, “Nice to have and small corrections” or “Well done”. This framework is particularly useful for product managers as they can prioritise the most important changes, without getting deep into the rationale behind it. It gives the responsibility to the User Experience experts to decide what can bring the most business value (or reduce the harm), identify the “low hanging fruits”, namely changes that are easy and bring usually moderate business value and what can wait, either due to importance or feasibility.
An example from the slidedeck of my expert review. German polished by a colleague. :)