Northwestern Mutual case study - 2022Migrate NIS to NGIS
Project Summary
Migrating the existing policies in legacy over to the new platform is necessary for users who need to view/download the policies. Currently, the prior series (NIS) in the new platform have a tag to help users differentiate the policies in the case summary screen. When choosing the prior series in the new platform, the user must open up the legacy system in order to utilize the illustration.
I worked on ideas to remind and motivate our users to update their policies into the new system. This is necessary for all users since policies in NIS will no longer exist in a year or two.
Role
Main UX designer leading this project, ideating early concepts, presenting regularly to leadership and stakeholders, and delivering final assets for handoff. Worked with 1 product manager, 1 engineer, and leads from illustrations and content strategist.
Mission
Inform and motivate users to update policies to the new platform, which duplicates the chosen policy and provides a new user experience.
Timeline
Q2-Q3 2022
User Flow
Problems
Policies will no longer live in NIS in a few months or years, which threatens the existence of the policies. In order to access the same policies, our users will need to migrate their existing policies in NIS over to the new platform in a seamless experience to view the same illustrations in the future.
Parts of NGIS, the new illustration platform, is still providing access to Illustrations using another style we are “sun setting” called Carbon UI toolkit. The Luna design system will not be used for this project, but I still needed to consider and bridge the gap between the Luna design system with Carbon UI.
Breakdown of Current Case Summary Screen
Business Problem
Because FRs are struggling to make fast decisions on the update, this leads to:
Increase in TTA (time to accept) and increase in costs required to boost these reminders, popups, banners, incentives to make them more attractive.
Encourages procrastination, not scalable for future use on other mandates.
Goals
Users
We want to encourage and empower users to quickly evaluate and decide to update and/or delete the NIS policies without stress, errors, and much time spent, while optimizing usability.
Business
We want to ensure all updates are successfull and fulfilled in a timely manner to minimize costs, time, and lates. The primary metric we’ll be looking at is TTA (time to accept) with a metric of cancellations and secondary metric will be Adoption Rate to measure adoption of new features as we roll them out.
Design Principles
Extensibility
Our solution should be scalable and extensible for future features and use cases.
Compelling
Updates that are seamless and easy should be attractive.
Speed
Users should be empowered to make this decision with as little steps possible.
Limit Errors
Our solution should maximize confidence and minimize errors which leads to cancellations.
Familiarity
Users can recognize new update tags need attention. Tags are part of the Carbon UI design system and are used to label, organize, or categorize specific policies. These display tags are used to show quick and useful category labels to the user.
Display Tags: highlights and helps users easily recognize relevance and purpose
Color: helps identify update function from consumer apps, confirms purpose and user recognizes process
Location: gives an idea of where the updates are needed and are associated only to eligible policies
Uninterrupted
These toast messages do not automatically close out and will have to be manually closed. The small message shows up in a box at the bottom of the screen while current activity remains visible and interactive. Within the message, a hyperlink is provided to launch the updates.
Shortcut: Users don’t choose individual policies, but the notification gathers all policies related to the “family” or “business” in the current screen. Reduces cognitive load, effort, and time spent for users to update each policy at a time. Bulk updates for all families and businesses are not optimized to measure all failures.
Reminders: Help users by consistently showing notification when signing into account and when jumping from screen to screen.
Cover All Interactions
Although the case summary screen is main point of initial interaction, it’s best to provide as many paths to a user’s success. Users are attracted to display tags and intrigued by toast messages. This will not overlap or interfere with banners and will remind users in multiple screens such as Case Summary screens, Composite Summary screens, and Composite Details.
Our goal for this feature was to:
Help FRs better understand the process of update/upgrade
Up sell the benefit of updating by preventing FRs from downloading policies if update is required and unsupported in the new platform without a migration.
Improve acceptance rate for future features.
Case Summary - Update Success
This is the first screen users will most likely encounter these updates. There are multiple paths to prompt the modal to start the update process.
If the user is able to successfully update all policies within a family or business, the update tags and toast will disappear and the updated policies will launch in NGIS with new policy options only available in the new platform.
Composite Summary - Partial Success
Whether the user encounters these updates in Case Summary, Composite Summary, or Composite Details, the update requirements will be hard to ignore.
If the user fails to update one or more of their policies, an error message informs them to try again, but the policy might not illustrate in the new platform. This is due to outdated policies that can not migrate unless manually deleted from NIS and added into NGIS. In order to reuse this design for multiple scenarios, the error and success messages were carefully arranged for implementation.
Composite Details - Update Failure
When updates fail, the user will be able to exit without trying again, but policies that are updated successfully are automatically removed from the modal. Users will see animated loaders, error icons, and green check icons for each individual policy to ensure the update is working and making progress. This will reduce user uncertainty indicate to the user tell users how long an these updates are taking.
Results
During the usability testing, FRs quickly understood and accepted the updates and its importance, especially with the loader animation, and saw them as an quick task to accomplish. In general, FRs felt confident to make a decision to accept or decline a batch of updates after they familiarized themselves with the update modal and process.