Summary

Design Systems are more than a collection of patterns and components. They are the frontline of engagement that delivers and reinforces your design promise to your customers.

Opportunity

The ClaimSearch application suite is a collection of 10 products and features that are an invaluable resource for measuring risk and potential fraud in the insurance claims industry. It is an industry standard for anti-fraud investigation with personas that include claims adjusters, special investigators, law enforcement, and insurance claims managers and decision makers. This diverse audience requires a single design system to present a consistent voice that delivers on the design promise of partnership.

Challenges

For this project the challenges I faced could be best classified as the application of change management within siloed environments. Other challenges included unstructured design guidelines and user experiences, as well as technical challenges which included multiple frameworks, platforms, and code bases.

From a Customer Experience point of view, the application had not seen an update to its interface in over 20 years.

What became an immediate priority was a change to a customer first and design thinking approach.

Outcome

As Senior Manager of UX/UI Design I made it a goal for our team to practice customer first, design thinking principles that included in-person customer visits, collaborative ideation with internal teams, user group discussions with customers, and A/B testing.

Design Thinking and Collaboration is Key

In order to arrive at a single design system we needed to embrace a collaborative approach to making design decisions. We structured recurring ideation exercises to define actionable items that would grow the pattern library and reinforce the  organizational design promise. These activities included customer visits to observe real life workflows and perform ideation exercise to better understand their pain points and recommendations. We also conducted sit downs and observations with internal teams to help paint the full picture of how we were delivering on our promise. These collaborative efforts were recurring and were necessary to define action items for improvements and growth of our design system and pattern libraries.

Prototyping and A/B Testing Speeds Progress

My original direction to the team began with designing in browser. We abandoned the conventional design reviews and moved to a more expedient prototyping based on one code base.  Once implemented we found this methodology to be much faster as we leaped past the review process of comps and visual design and worked directly from a global CSS to build components and options to review in browser.

This resulted in the ability to quickly change any minor enhancements on the fly and speed implementation with development teams. These workflows would later evolve to Pattern Lab and Figma libraries.

Using a single global CSS file empowered the team to deliver fast, user tested design that was scalable and actionable within an agile and scrum workflow.

The Transformation of ClaimSearch UX Design

The workflow was very successful and as the enhancements began to reach production environments, we were able to pivot the team to more proactive research and exploratory development. Experimenting with the latest JS packages for new features. Engage in direct collaborative exercises with customers and user testing.  Build and test in an Agile or Lean workflow. With this architecture the team was able to output new UX enhancements in design sprints and maintain tested readiness of new components ahead of development.

These collaborative interactions with both customers and internal teams helped to build a sense of partnership with customers who use the product and the teams that build the product. The overall sentiment from external and internal feedback was positive and could be measured not only in customer and employee satisfaction but also in the bottom line of profitability.

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