When I joined, Relay consisted of a simple form and a rough idea for a “risk tower” visualization. I brought those ideas to maturity as part of an end-to-end workflow complete with email integration, dashboards, permissions, and so on.
This is a risk towner screenshot from the video. It visually shows how much risk a reinsurance company is willing to cover. You can view multiple providers, pin your favorites, and assemble full coverage:
I shot the first promo for Relay Platform myself. It shows shows more of the product context and some Risk Tower interactions I designed.
Customer Feedback
It took a long time to learn to talk the talk with customers and to walk the line between winning important customers while getting up to speed. Sometimes a customer might tell us: “Guys, this is basic insurance. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you”. Sometimes we’d get contradictory information. It was humbling, but we persevered and won even over the skeptics once they saw how much time they were saving.
Here is a 1 minute video from a customer team that saved time with Relay:
Views for Multiple Participants
Designing multi-participant experiences meant always considering how a change on one side affected other parties. For example:
- Broker submitting an application users tower to request and view quotes
- Carrier viewing the application uses tower to see where their quotes lie with respect to what is requested
Here is what it looked like for a broker to enter a risk tower and view quotes visually:
Example Tower Interaction Challenges
The Tower graph was our flagship feature to represent a request for coverage. An insurer claims some part of that surface area with their quote. Here are some example UI/interaction challenges with Towers that I faced:
- When layers quoted were different than the layers requested (didn’t visually map)
- Showing overlapping layers e.g., several quotes in exact same position on tower
- Showing layers that are too thin to show e.g., insurer quotes 1% of the width of a layer
- Tower sits on top of another tower (so the visual scale is skewed or unknown)
- How to show “non-quoted” retention – as absence of a layer or as different type of layer?
- When coverage meta-data differs for adjacent layers (not applies to applies)
Here is an example of how I addressed the latter:
I ignored this problem as an edge case until I ran into a customer that dealt with this a lot. I interviewed them about why they needed this information. I then designed the above enhancement to give them that insight.
Relay had about 4 target personas based on stories we heard over and over as they features on an earlier website:
Making Hard Decisions
Sometimes, you have to let go of ideas you’ve invested in. These are some spin-off project samples I invested significant research and design time into. They didn’t pan out. In one case, I lobbied to kill the project by analyzing the pros and cons, citing changes in our target audience, the market, and our strategy. This decision allowed the team to focus on more profitable opportunities.
Dealing With Ambiguity & Complexity
Complexity and moving targets made scoping, prototyping, and designing difficult. Challenges included inconsistent language among brokers, complex workflow requirements, and differences in how brokerages worked.
I knew that large brokers spent significant time assembling complex risk towers. I grappled with questions like: What qualifies as complex? Is this our target segment? How does it integrate with our product? Through research, I identified key decision points and worked with SMEs and Product to clarify and make assumptions.
Making sense of the domain, I sketched visualizations to identify commonalities in insurance towers. This helped me lead discussions around “What’s the simplest starting point?” and “What are the key dependencies?” I played a key role in resolving this through analysis, concepting, and gathering early feedback:
End of Story
Despite securing influential customers, we didn’t get the self-serve, exponential growth we needed with this product. The business was complex, change management slow. The cyber market, in contrast, was experiencing a lot of innovation due to (1) growing cyber risk in the market and (2) higher tech maturity of providers (APIs) that makes scaling easier. As a result, the reinsurance product was retired, and the company pivoted to cyber insurance.
Images/videos were taken from our public website, social, and Youtube.