RLI x Bradley Convergence Project
I was team lead of the UX Bradley team, and in collaboration with the Bradley Business Students team, we worked with RLI to create a tool/application to improve their underwriting system. Our main priorities were researching competitors, journey mapping, and user surveys to fully understand our objective.
Problems to Solve and Project Goals
RLI's Property underwriters have many third-party data elements available to them in the system. The issue with this is that having all these third-party elements increase the cost of creating an underwriting ticket and most of all makes the process go by in a less efficient manner. The solutions the UX and business teams need to solve is how to minimize data utilization for greater efficiency, decrease the time for underwriters to form a quote, and how to cut cost on data retrieval. We must also incorporate what RLI's overall business goals were of the project and also the user goals of the underwriters who would be using this new tool.
01
How to incorporate UX into the solution?
As underwriting isn't really part of a UX designers skillset, but with some explanation and examples provided from RLI and further explanation from the business team we got a feel for what exactly we are hoping to solve from a designer's standpoint. Most of this project is research based as we need to make sure to fully understand the product we will be designing for. All research and meeting notes were documented in a shared FigJam file.
03
Research competitors to see what other companies are doing that's working best.
It was best if my team were to also see what other companies are doing in terms of a similar system RLI is trying to strive for so my team thought the best solution was to research and create a competitive analysis of RLI's main competitors. Finding the pros and cons of each company and summarizing the final findings of what works best and what doesn't.
02
Figure out schedules and milestones to fit assignments within scope.
Part of the scope process of planning assignments around this project was figuring out and communicating with RLI what the important deadlines would be. Wanted to have my team work using agile method to complete weekly tasks in a subject manner for the most efficiency in making progress with RLI.
Finding the flaws of current tools
As part of our research in finding ways to lower the time it takes for underwriters to get their required information, we looked into the tools they use in order to fill out a quote. As the UX team looked into these tools we found some flaws that we expressed concerns about that we could fix and change to increase future underwriter efficiency. We would keep this flaws in mind of what to look out for when we reach the design phase.
Conducting User Survey's and Interviews with RLI Underwriters
Our biggest asset to our team's research is hearing from the underwriters themselves. My team was able to interview with 2 underwriters remotely and ask questions specifically tailored to figuring out what has worked best for them as an underwriter, time spent to make a quote, tools they use, and who are their users/audience.
Final Presentation/Next Steps
At the end of the semester we gave a final presentation of all our research findings in the underwriting process and how we plan to incorporate UX design and principles to create an easy to use tool for future underwriters and presented to our clients at RLI alongside the Bradley Business students. We then discussed next steps for the project moving forward and talked more about the design phase of what the tool is finally gonna start looking like and also gaining more user survey answers from more underwriters from RLI as the Nielson Norman group recommends at least 5-10 surveys be conducted for the most accurate feedback possible.
Final Presentation Deck to RLI
Underwriting efficiency roadmap of overall project milestones
Diagram of User Centered Design Principles and practices
Projected next steps and main points to work upon for the future of this project
