TLDR; Delivering an outcome under significant time pressure
- Context (what’s Zero?)
- MTAs
- Goals / metrics / measures
- Restraints (time, development)
- The team + stakeholders
- Existing journeys in AO
- Peformance in those journeys
- Competitor review
- Legal and compliance review process
- Their audit trail
- Designing the thing (rush)
- Testing quickly
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What is Aviva Zero?
You may have heard of Aviva – it’s a large insurance and pensions provider in the UK. Aviva Zero is a spin-off insurance product created as a separate entity from Aviva. It’s purpose was two-fold:
- Aviva’s first foray into a carbon concious insurance product
- An opportunity to test new development platforms and techniques
So what are we talking about here?
When you’ve got a car insurance policy, sometimes you need to change it. Like when you’ve moved house, bought a new car or want to add your partner to drive.
When Aviva Zero launched, customers were able to do this but only by calling up the call center. Our call center staff are lovely but it means customers face wait times and can only make changes during open hours – not great if you work a full time job!
This project is about building an online journey to let people make changes to their car insurance.
What does success look like?
Needs to:
- Be built on time (insert timescale)
- Serve the function intended
- Be approved by legal
- Do it quicker than a call center agent
- Be replicable for future MTAs
- Reduce call volumes from 100% to x% of all MTA requests
Who was involved? Team + stakeholders
Restraints
…………………………………………. OLD below………………..
TLDR; Improving UX’s perception and widening it’s circle of influence inside a slow moving, complex business.
Sounds great, is there a problem?
The business was formed in late 2021, and I joined in early 2022.
As you would expect, the first thing the business did was to make a few key decisions about the direction of the proposition and the priorities for the coming year. With hindsight I believe these decisions were made with the best intentions. However, there was a missing piece to the puzzle, a chair missing from the table.
The business embarked upon this project without ever actually asking people what they thought about the product! No discovery took place.
REWRITE BELOW (RED)
This is a rectifiable problem (and when I joined, we did rectify it, more on that later). But it is indicitive of a deeper problem that is prevalant in many large companies; the perception of UX research being a checkbox exercise. Something to do quickly before you launch a product. UXers are seen to have a specific, narrow skillset – creating nice looking designs – and are seen to be adding value outside of the building phase.
Obviously to those involved in the industry it’s easy to poo-poo this attitude and dismiss it as lazy, but to those working as product owners, legal advisors, ops agents and basically anybody outside of digital it’s an assumption that’s easy to make.
The challenge, then, is to change these misconceptions within the business (whilst doing the day job!).
Who’s mind needs changing, then?
The makeup of the business is typical of an insurance spinoff. Lots of vastly experienced people make up the higher eschelons of the tower, and that’s backed up by a sea of heads plucked from the regular business. These workers are often dedicated, highly skilled, know insurance like the back of their hand and have a key trait – they’ve been in insurance for a long time.
These factors combine to produce an atmosphere of confidence and efficiency. And since that cofindence is often backed up by years of working on successful insurance products it often comes with a hint of unwillingness to change.
How did we rectify the initial prioritisation decisions?
How do you measure influence?
- Complexity
- Stakeholder management – empathy mapping
- Ways of working
- “Paper trail” – letting legal go back
- Managing different projects
- estimating future timelines
- manoeuvering so that UX gets a seat at the table (after joining a new spin up part of the business late)
- influencing prioritisation decisions
- changing perception about what UX is in the company
- improving the relationships between UX and;
- ops
- legal
- leadership
- product
- development
- working out ways of working
- internally within the zero design team
- Mentoring / managing
- Renewals
- play by play walkthrough of the project
- focus on convincing stakeholders