Reimagining insurance with design thinking
Blackboard Insurance is reimagining the entire commercial insurance experience with a customer-centric, technology-forward and data-driven approach. Turning the insurance industry on its head requires solving big, business and technical problems with creativity and curiosity. The core of Blackboard’s offering is to build technologically strong and innovative platforms that handle everything from underwriting, claims, broker portfolios, analytics dashboard, and more.
Role: Product designer
I was the responsible Product Designer to lead the product design efforts to build out our suite of data-centric, machine-augmented, end-to-end insurance applications. My design work has been primarily focused on building out our internal tools. My team’s mission is to build innovative and well-crafted internal tools that support fellow Blackboard employees and their workflows with a particular focus on enabling internal collaboration, productivity and accuracy. Being a designer at Blackboard means using design methods and techniques to empower insurance experts to thrive and do their jobs the best they can.
Company
Blackboard Insurance
Year
2018 – 2020
Role
Senior Product Designer
Responsibilities
Leading design work on internal and external apps
User research
Workshop facilitation
Partnering with cross-functional peers to conceptualize and build software products
HIGHLIGHTED PROJECTS
My design work has primarily been focused on our underwriting platform, our claims platform, as well as our internal operations and workflow management tools. Due to specific privacy concerns, I am not able to share a lot of details about these projects on this online portfolio, but I’m happy to discuss the projects more in detail if requested specifically.
The different applications I have worked on relate to different places in the customer journey.
the high-level journey
My design work was focused on several aspects of the customer journey from submission, to underwriting, to self-service tools and claims.
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
We designed and built a workflow management tool to administer users, permissions and rules for our suite of applications. In addition, this tool also was designed to manage and support workflows for different user types. I was the Lead Designer on this project and I was actively engaged from conceptualization through implementation.
BROKER PORTFOLIO
We conceptualized and designed a broker portfolio application for our broker partners. The goal was to give brokers insights into submission and policy status, claims, and direct communications with Blackboard. I was the Lead Designer on this project and my activities included running design sprints with stakeholders, doing user testing and presenting the solution to the leadership at Blackboard and the broker partners.
This project has not been implemented yet.
UNDERWRITING
Underwriting is at the core of an insurance carrier’s responsibilities. We needed to change how underwriting was being done in an innovative solution. To support this, we built out an underwriting platform that heavily integrates 3rd-party data from various sources, empowers the underwriters to make informed decisions and manages submissions and policies.
claims resolution
We needed to bring claims in-house at Blackboard and for that we decided to build out an application that would make claims resolution machine-augmented, intuitive and accessible for claims handlers.
The application handles everything from loss and policy information, to financials and payments, to litigation management.
DESIGN PROCESS: LEAN AND EXPERIMENTAL
The design process at Blackboard covers discovery through implementation. This process follows the basic steps of design thinking with a particular emphasis on iterative prototyping and experimentation to validate ideas quickly and early. Our process works like this:
Gather input through observations, listening, comments or feedback.
Synthesize the input to identify where we will go next and what we need to create.
Create an artifact/prototype using the appropriate level of fidelity.
Communicate the artifact we created, through the appropriate channel and to the appropriate audience to gather further input.
DESIGN PROCESS
My design work was focused on several aspects of the customer journey from submission, to underwriting, to self-service tools and claims.