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BhartiAXA is a collaboration between the Bharti Group (US$13 billion) and AXA Insurance, a French multinational insurance firm. It is one of the life insurance majors in the Indian market, with 263 offices across the country.
During the COVID-19 pandemic with more users getting online, BhartiAXA embarked on a digital transformation journey. As part of this transformation journey, BhartiAXA wanted to rethink their products, redesign user journeys and reimagine their digital platform – Bhartiaxa.com – completely.
Our ask was to find a simpler, smarter and global way of presenting, finding and buying life insurance. It was a 3-month engagement for HUDE, covering user research, understanding product features and benefits, and reimagining their digital presence to make it simpler, more human and more attractive to their new target audience.
Between the first and second waves of COVID-19, we began with three weeks of research on user behavior, mapping the experience states of life insurance players and gaining an understanding of various stakeholders, their expectations and needs.
Along with the project team, we identified twelve key stakeholders from technology, product, digital, brand, SEO, tech and customer care – leaders across the board. Using a combination of recorded interviews, Q&A and open conversation, we navigated through the existing business flows, identified inter-departmental interactions and mapped the business goals and needs.
By the time we got into the groove of researching with customers, we were in the midst of the COVID second wave. We primed pre-selected customers for remote interviews, sending them questionnaires, recording, asking them to play solution maker and seeking feedback with A&B testing.
We zoomed out to take a view of the industry and analyzed the competitors and mapped the company’s position within the life insurance industry vis-à-vis the existing customer experience.
With user, product, stakeholders and the competition findings in place – it was time to bring it all together, face-to-face, with all the key stakeholders and decision makers in a room. What made it easier was the eagerness of company stakeholders and teams to make this change happen.
Coming face to face with the findings enlightened the team and also empowered us to get some answers early on. Importantly, it re-affirmed the HUDE quest to put a human face on life insurance, and keep the ‘human touch’ at the core of the design.
A major thrust area of the project was to co-create the solution in collaboration with the stakeholders.
The HUDE team began to produce visual templates immediately after the initial wireframes & journey mappings.
Guided by the insights and findings, team HUDE put together possible design directions and took the stakeholders along for design-direction explorations, and zeroing in on the final direction. Taking the #DoTheSmartThing to the design board, we explored two possible directions: #humansmart & #techsmart – finally settling for the human touch.
The HUDE team gained deep immersion in the brand and made key suggestions that differentiated not only the company’s digital experience but also their business processes. For example, rethinking and rewriting page navigation labels, and reworking the FAQs as per the user buying journey and including them at key points to help the user in decision making.
The co-creation approach not only empowered the company’s project team but also the tech team. The agile & inclusive approach, annotated design, and early conceptualization and delivery of the design style guide enabled downstream workflows to kick in well in time. As a result, tech and product teams got an early start to begin producing the content-intensive web pages.
The pandemic was as its peak and we started with the prototype design of the key templates. With all the inputs in place, our team started creating the templates manifesting the vision of the style guide and responding to the different user scenarios and business needs.
We set up an internal team of users for a quick but remote round of testing-with-the-users round. Gathering insights from business stakeholder and user feedback we iterated, created a more evolved version of final product prototype.
Finally, the reimagined digital presence was delivered and went live. The design transformation delivered by team HUDE contained various design elements – content design, redesigned user journeys, restructured product page, integration of video content, illustrative charts, iconography, simplified information navigation, style for guide content writing and a human way to present Insurance.
