Auto Insurance Tool

Improving the vehicle insurance shopping experience

Overview

The Challenge

The auto insurance product helped users find, compare, and ultimately decide on the best auto insurance product that meets their needs. The landing page for this product existed on its own legacy front end client, which negatively impacted SEO capabilities and page rank because of the limitations on page editing, optimization, mobile friendliness, as well as poor page speed and performance.

In addition, the core of the shopping experience was provided by a third-party, with less-than-desirable conversion rates. How might we help users find and efficiently shop across top carriers so they can make a decision about the best auto insurance policy for them?

The Solution

We redesigned the landing page with the goal of creating a template that can be easily optimized and maintained by internal teams, while helping users better compare their auto insurance options. We also designed and built the shopping experience on NerdWallet’s domain to ultimately replace third-party experience.

For comparison, please see the previous design , the redesign I led (2021) and the implementation today Although there has been some changes and additions over time, the redesign I led still proves to be the backbone of the auto insurance shopping experience.

My role

I worked on the UX and visual design on this project. A UX researcher provided user insight as needed.

Landing Page Redesign

Initial hypothesis

“We believe that if we make it easier for our content and marketing team to update and optimize the auto insurance tool page, we will significantly improve the user experience when shopping and comparing car insurance rates. We will know this to be true when our car insurance page traffic improves due to the benefits of better enabling SEO.”

The initial hypothesis was formulated by the business and product management team and focused more on internal user (content, marketing) goals than the actual user (consumer) goals. I needed to better understand the goals of the different user groups to iterate and improve on the initial hypothesis.

User segment

In consultation with the UX researcher, I learned that the primary users of the auto insurance tool where balancers, who were constantly making trade-offs between different financial priorities in their lives, and so were more open to investing the time to find the best deals.

Primary user segment (balancers)

User Journey

In consultation with the UX researcher, I also learned that users in general visited tool pages in the “Narrow” and “Decide” phases of their journey. With this I inferred their goals revolved around comparison and certainty about their decision.

Simplified user journey

User intent

To better understand the intent of users when they visit the auto insurance tool page, I researched the top Google search keywords that brought them to the page. The keywords were:

• "Compare car insurance rates"
  
• "Best car insurance company in [X] state."
  
• "Best car insurance company poor credit"
  

User goals

With a better understand of the user segment, journey and intent, I summarized what I believed were the primary user goals as follows:

“As a Balancer who constantly makes tradeoffs in my personal finance decisions to maximize the value of products and services I purchase at a reasonable price:

When I’m in the market for new vehicle insurance, I want to be able to evaluate different options, so that I can choose the best option that satisfies my needs and circumstances.

When I’m considering purchasing new vehicle insurance, I want to be able to compare different options, so that I can identify a set of options that could potentially satisfy some or all of my needs and circumstances.”

Internal user goals

I had conversations with the content, marketing and engineering teams to better understand their goals with the project, which I documented as follows:

“As a content or marketing team member, I want to be able to easily update the content on auto insurance tool pages, so that I can improve the SEO page rank of auto insurance tool pages.

As an engineering team member, I want to create a new, or reuse, an existing template on auto insurance tool pages, so that I can optimize performance and reduce technical debt.”

Reframed hypothesis

With a better understanding of internal and external user goals, I reframed the hypothesis to focus the team on solving the actual user problems and improving their experience as opposed to focusing on the internal user problems.

“We believe that if we make it easier for users to compare and evaluate options for auto insurance, we will significantly improve user engagement with the tool page. We will know this to be true when SEO traffic to the page and entry point CTR increases.”

Auditing the current experience

With the team in alignment with the reframed hypothesis, I proceeded to audit the current experience to identify shortcomings and opportunities for improvement. Below I show some of the issues identified.

overwhelming amount of content

I created an information architecture map of the current page, which revealed the in-page navigation to be inefficient and confusing

Confusing information architecture

Primary CTA not given appropriate priority

Design explorations

Based on findings from discovery and audit, I documented anchors to guide design explorations and decisions going forward.

Design anchors

Lead flow Redesign

Hypothesis

“We believe that by creating an experience that collects and pre-fills our users' information on top carrier sites, we can help them efficiently shop across multiple carriers. We will know this to be true when we maintain performance parity with the current Quinstreet experience, measured by ARPV.”

Auditing the third-party (Quinstreet) experience

With a clearly documented hypothesis in hand, I evaluated the Quinstreet experience to identify shortcomings and opportunities for improvement. Below are some of the more serious issues identified.

• First question about your home is jolting, does not match user expectations with auto insurance.
  
• No easy way to go back to previous steps in the flow.
  

Interrupting the information flow to "sell more stuff" is disingenuous and confusing to users.

Reimagining the flow - high intent users

• Ready to share PII
  
• Has an immediate need to switch or buy new auto insurance.
  

High intent user flow

Reimagining the flow - medium intent users

• Ready to share PII, but with some limitation (doesn't want calls or be "spammed" with emails)
  
• Does not have an immediate need to switch or buy new auto insurance, but could if the rate is good.
  

Medium intent user flow

Reimagining the flow - low intent users

• Hesitant to share PII
  
• Just looking, but definitely interested. Discounts could be a motivator.
  

Low intent user flow

Final designs

• Optimized for users with "medium intent", allowing us to collect personal information a little later in the flow, reducing drop-offs.
  
• Questions organized logically to better match user expectations.
  
• Standardized template created and added to Currency (NerdWallet design system), to be leveraged by designers across the company.
  

Anatomy of a flow

For comparison please see the Quinstreet experience, the redesigned NerdWallet experience (2001) and the implementation today Although there has been some changes and additions over time, the redesign I led still proves to be the backbone of the auto insurance shopping experience.

Reach out if you want to create impactful experiences together.