Westfield Insurance
A UX Case Study (2018)
OVERVIEW
Westfield Insurance is a northeastern Ohio based insurance company. The UX team was tasked with redesigning and rebranding the website to make it more modern, fresh and usable.
MY ROLE
UX Designer
Design, prototyping and wireframes
Interaction Design
RESULTS
The project was incredibly successful garnering a design award and putting Westfield Insurance into parity with other modern insurance websites. The branding was well-received and the customers are flocking to the website.
Designed for Westfield Insurance.
PROBLEM
Westfield Insurance was updating their website and overall brand. They had never done this and commissioned the UX team to aid them in the journey.
"I don't use the Westfield site because you can't do anything on it."
"I would much rather call than use the Westfield website."
"I'm pretty sure that site has not ever been updated."
"I've been a member for 15 years and don't think I've ever even been onto the website."
HOW MIGHT WE
Redesign and rebrand Westfield Insurance's website with flair and high usability and encourage customer adoption?
OVERVIEW

Outdated to Hip

Highly regarded northeastern Ohio company Westfield Insurance wanted to redesign their website and brand. The nearly 200 year old company had always had the same rustic, old-world branding and needed a refresh. This project was to fully redesign the website from the ground up and implement the new brand for a fresh and modern look.
Project Goals
1
Redesign and rewrite the entire website.
2
Implement new branding and aesthetics.
3
Desktop, tablet and mobile responsiveness.
4
Increase traffic and excitement by 15%.
My Role
On this project I was a senior UX designer working with a team of 6 designers to deliver the project. Each teammate had strengths that were leveraged to deliver the project on time and under-budget. To put it simply, my role was that of a generalist who predominantly handled design.
UX Design
Working with an outside agency, we refined and delivered wireframes to support the overall redesign effort including templates for 16 high-visibility pages.
Interaction Design
Partnering with the business and technical teams to ensure the user-centered design principles were infused, entrenched and considered from discovery to implementation.
Self-Service Tools
I focused on how things work for the Westfield Insurance site and ensured that everything from in-page buttons were clear to how the overall structure of the site was pieced together.
Branding
Working with the business and internal Westfield teams to ensure the Payment, Agent Finder, Career and Size-Up tools were usable, simple and reflected the new branding.
Strategy
Myself and another designer were tasked with ideating around the new branding and were asked to create detailed, thorough landing page concepts with multiple branding aesthetics.
Project Summary
UX project to design and deliver an iOS app for the Camping World sales team.
My Role
UX Lead, Project Management, Wireframes, Interaction Design, User Research and Analysis. The design team on this was a vendor partner UI Designer and myself.
Introduction
Camping World is a leading retail company that sells RVs across the USA. This project was a multi-part project to design an iOS application built on the back of Salesforce that employees can use to manage the sales process.
The Challenge
Sales associates had been using the out-of-the-box Salesforce and were very confused by it. The challenge was to provide a tool built on the back of Salesforce that was simple to use and effective in sales.
Discovery
tl;dr The team conducted user research, heuristic evaluations, card sorts and a competitive analysis to get a firm understanding of the problem.
Executive Summary
Prologue
Summary Video
Short on time? Please take a look at the 6 minute video overview below to fill in any gaps and provide a bite-size overview of the project.
Getting Started
At the onset, the team decided to start with a heuristic evaluation of the existing Westfield Insurance website to understand what needed updated. The old website was proprietary and had a lot of usability issues that would need addressed.
Additional Discovery
To continue learning and progressing, the team employed some other tactics as well: Competitor Analysis, Branding Study and User Research. All of these were used to better understand the problem we were tackling prior to design.
DISCOVERY
1. Heuristic Evaluation
DISCOVERY
2. Competitor Evaluation
DISCOVERY
3. Brand Study
User Research
The team also conducted some ad-hoc usability testing with Westfield customers throughout the design phase to get some insight and understanding of their pain points and desires for the site.
USER QUOTE
PAM, Westfield Customer
"I do not use the Westfield site. It is old and has outdated information on it. I would much rather call than use the website!"
USER QUOTE
PETER, Westfield Customer
"You can't do anything on the site...so why would I use it? If I go to another insurance site I can pay my bill or run a quote - but not Westfield."
USER QUOTE
JEN, Westfield Customer
"I can't find my way around the Westfield site at all... pure and simple."
USER QUOTE
SARAH, Westfield Customer
"Whoever wrote the articles on the Westfield site forgot to add anything of interest! I think they are dry and just remind me of old men."
Key Findings
Below is the summary of key findings that were learned from users while conducting ad-hoc research.
NO SELF SERVICE
Most modern websites have interactive tools - Westfield had none. This was a problem for users as nothing was self-serve requiring a phone call.
NAVIGATION ISSUES
Users were clear that the navigation of the existing insurance products was difficult due to many choices which hindered findability.
DESIGN OUTDATED 
Users reported that they did not identify with Westfield's brand and wanted something more modern.
NO COMPELLING CONTENT
Insurance content and general tone was deemed dry and uninspired by users. They wanted a fresh take on insurance.
Design
tl;dr The UX team designed 16 site templates site and worked with the business to get approvals for the site IA, structure and functionality.
Design Process
Design for this project was essentially taking only the skeleton of the previous Westfield Insurance site and building on it layer by layer for the new site. We started at the core with the information architecture and moved into structure with wireframes and finally created prototypes to demo interaction design.
SKETCHING
Due to the nature of starting fresh we began ideation on whiteboards and moved to wireframes fairly quickly working toward templates of the major site areas.
WIREFRAME
Prototypes via Axure, InVision and through Sketch allowed us to see the site in action ahead of any development and work to ensure it was highly usable.
PROTOTYPE
The card sort was conducted in an effort to streamline and reduce complexity of the information architecture of the site and allowing users to tell us how it ought to be constructed.
DESIGN PROCESS
1. Sketching
DESIGN PROCESS
2. Wireframes
DESIGN PROCESS
3. Prototypes
DESIGN PROCESS
4. Card Sort
DESIGN PROCESS
5. Designed Templates
Personas
Piecing People Together. Personas were borne from the contextual interviews and understanding the business process to a higher fidelity. Armed with that knowledge we then understood what problems we were trying to solve for Sales Associates and who we were ultimately designing with in mind.
Camping World Sales Associate
Josh the Super Salesman | 47
"I just want to talk to customers. All I want or need is an RV model and a phone number and I'll take it from there."
AGE
25-47
OCCUPATION
Sales Associate
INCOME
50-75k
TECHNICAL
Mid-Low
Overview
Sales Associates are the face of Camping World. They are motivated by selling and communicating with customers. They have little interest in busy-work associated with sales CRMs and believe that slows them down.
Overall they dislike Salesforce and feel it does not support them in their processes. More than that however, they do not believe they need a platform to help them with their role.
Needs
  • Simple, quick designs that enable them to reduce time in the system
  • Design should be non-intrusive to their sales process
  • Design that should be 'lightweight' and quick
Frustrations
  • Navigational issues within Salesforce
  • Time on task for each 'Activity' required
  • Hidden information and the need to find it
  • Too many options leads to paralysis and rebellion
DESIGN
Sketching Solutions
Putting Ideas to Sketchpad. Sketches were used to get the basic layout of the app completed ahead of moving pixels. Below are some examples of sketching done prior to moving toward a finalized design. The purpose here was to get the basic flow and layout structure before wireframing.
Prototypes
A Higher Fidelity.  For this project instead of wireframes, we chose a prototype to focus on the interaction design of the app. The overall flow would be worked out in mini-user research sessions with Sales Associates. The intent was to reduce the amount of information and time associated with all activities in the app and provide everything in 4 simple tabs: Tasks, Customers, Communicator and Showroom.
View Prototype
Design Solutions
Designing with users in mind. The project involved a full redesign and reconfiguring and redesigning the entire website from the information architecture to the visual design language. As a UX team we had to consider everything and ensure it all worked together.
Design Solution
New Design Language
A new aesthetic, design language and brand. This project marked the dawn of a new era for Westfield Insurance. Everything was new: colors, logo, font and design system overall. The site won a design award for it's aesthetics.
Design Solution
Interactive Insurance Tools
Provide minimal yet viable self-service. During research, users were clear that the non-interactive nature of the previous site was a detriment. For the update, we added in functionality for payments, career searching, finding an agent and more.
Design Solution
New Content Tone
Pivoting to a new voice. One big push for the project was to establish a new voice that is complementary to the new brand. To do this some members of the UX team partnered with the marketing team to update over 100+ pages of content.
Design Solution
Simplify Information Architecture
Sinplifying navigation improves usability. The old version of the site had non-optimized information architecture and multiple tabs to wade through. We simplified the navigation by card sorting with users and then applying what was learned.
Screen Flows
Overall Screen Composition and Flows. The app was deceptively simple but had a lot of avenues users could go down to complete tasks. The workflows were prototyped and determined during and below are wireframes showing the first and second navigational levels of the app from the prototype.
Camping World Prototype Screen Flow
The USERS
The users detailed below are the users who the solution was designed with in mind. Below is some relevant information about them and their personas.
Camping World Sales Associate

Camping World Sales Associates

Branding
Add the Finishing Touches. Westfield Insurance had a new design language and it completely replaced the previous one including typography, colors, language and all flourishes. I have a better version of this but need to find it and then will replace the image below.
Testing
tl;dr I managed the planning and usability testing for the project and was able to get some helpful feedback for refining the initial version.
Usability Testing
Identifying Issues via Observation. For this project the developers created a working prototype and we gave it to the users to usability test in the field. I conducted moderated usability testing sessions with users and observed them using the application.
TYPE
Usability
PARTICIPANTS
20
TYPE
Sales Users
FINDINGS
25+
USER QUOTE
"Task List a is lot easier to look at and understand than in Salesforce because it is much simpler in how it works."
‍
- Sales Associate
USER QUOTE
"It is extremely easy to find my customers using the Customers tab and that saves me time. I click the tab and do a quick search - easy."
‍
- Sales Associate
USER QUOTE
"The app is awesome! The best part is being able to show customers photos of campers in our inventory. It is very quick and smooth."
‍
- Sales Associate
USER QUOTE
"The chat is amazing. I don't even have to use my real phone number. This saves me from getting hounded by customers after-hours. Very cool stuff and helpful for the sales process."
‍
- Sales Associate
Project Results
The Results. The website launched to much fanfare in 2018 and quickly became the new hub for Westfield Insurance customers new and old. The rebranding was a success with customers raving about the transition and how it reinforced old ideas but offered a new perspective.
16
PAGE TEMPLATES
Designed by the UX team to cover the gamut of insurance products and services.
06
MONTHS
From pushing pixels with wireframes and prototypes to live deployment for customer use.
05
SELF SERVICE TOOLS
Tools for customers to use including Agent Finder, Career Portal, Size Up Tool, Payment Tool.
01
AWARDS RECEIVED
Recipient of the Silver 'ADDY' award (American Advertising Awards) for the new branding and design.
The Impact
As this project ended, it was both internally and externally deemed a successs. All goals we set out to accomplish were completed and delivered on with precision and solid execution. Company attention shifted toward a customer portal and the project was a success with hundreds of customers are using the website to this day.
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