About The Project

A local insurance agency came to me for help attracting a wider audience to their business. Their initial ask was for help with advertising via social media. After auditing their digital footprint, I made the recommendation of a multi-step plan that first called to expand and modernize their digital presence, ensuring that their advertising dollars could be used effectively in the future.

Roles

‍UX design, UI design, Brand Strategy, Copywriting, Project Management (procure and manage development partners)

Objectives

• Capture more leads from an expanded demographic and geographical range
• Refresh brand identity in a way that modernizes while retaining recognition locally
• Appeal to younger and more tech-savvy audience while maintaining familiarity for current users (majority 60+)
  

Discovery

Alongside a thorough review of the client's existing website, the discovery phase included:

• Distilled site analytics to understand current user patterns
• Interviews with owners to uncover core business needs and goals and discover value propositions
• Secondary research on local and national competitors
• Industry-focused research on the advantages of independent brokerages to further inform messaging

Insights gained from this research were used to define and prioritize project goals and create a feature roadmap. Two personas were developed to represent the existing client base and the aspirational new audience the brand wishes to attract.

Design

Creating a Foundation

Site architecture and wireframes were established and presented to gain concensus among the project's stakeholders on the overall flow and goals of the site. Key actions included:

• Reorganizing and consolidating the way information is presented
• Reducing the total number of CTA's in favor of more purposeful user flows that drive action

Refreshing the Brand Identity

The challenge to refresh CVIA's logo mark was two-fold. Refreshing the brand's overall identity while maintaining recognition in the established market - without the need for a rebrand campaign - and blending with existing assets, such as signage. This created a way to help meet the needs of a small business to make changes over time to accommodate limited time and budget resources.

Solutions that addressed these constraints included:

• Lightened the overall color scheme, retaining the dominant red and pulling back the use of black, and introducing an a third primary and several secondary colors to the palette
• Use of the company's signature 'state map outline', presented in a new way
• Implementing a mix of stock and custom imagery to evoke the company's core values of comfort, simplicity, and small town roots, along with more and higher quality visuals of the team and surrounding town, as well as introducing more family and home oriented visuals throughout

Screen Mockups and Content Building

Recommendations for content included bringing more attention to individual agents to help establish the personal service clients receive and introducing a new quote request form that gathers more information, allowing agents to respond to inquiries more quickly. Emphasizing friendly, 'we do it for you' messaging throughout the site copy reinforces a key differentiator for the company when competing against larger, hands-off providers.

Conclusion

Next Steps

At the outset of the project, we determined that a redesign of the company's digital presence and messaging was simply a first step to meeting their expansion goals. Recommendations for the future include:

• Increase engagement by creating interactive elements, i.e. a risk tolerance quiz
• Feature price comparison scenarios for targeted policy types
• Communicate personal service through stories - i.e. featuring real scenarios, agents directly advocating for clients or solving tough problems
• Increase proactive communication via monthly/quarterly newsletter to client/prospect list (internally run or outsourced)

Lessons Learned

Two aspects of this project that I found most valuable as a designer were the opportunity to:

1. Experiment with building robust, flexible components for forms in Figma
2. Working directly with a developer to create the responsive site, including a CMS that gives the client the ability to update much of their content in-house over time

I learned the most by having the opportunity to interact directly with the developer on which design features tend to be more or less complicated to implement and look forward to bringing that knowledge to future projects.