Blend is a fintech company that champions transforming the mortgage and consumer banking industry. Their goal is to simplify and improve transparency within financial services for better access. This summer was able to witness their IPO, and was part of their premiere design intern cohort.
The Home Insurance product is an example of a space they are trying to improve, and my main project this summer, "Standalone Policy Checkout," is an MVP that will retarget consumers who may have dropped off in the existing workflow.
I also had the opportunity to take part in initiatives within their Design Systems, optimize for engagement for Blend Insurance Agency, and participate in their annual hackathon.
— Collaborate and implement feedback from cross-functional partners
— Design multiple iterations of the mockups to optimize the visual design
— Develop and discuss the product strategy alongside product managers
How might we retarget consumers who have previously opted-in to see insurance options with Blend Insurance Agency, but didn’t follow through with accepting a policy?
Email is the main method of communication to retarget the consumer back into the funnel, introducing an insurance quote chosen by an agent.
We then take the consumer to a Standalone Webapp to review the quote, and confirm any assumptions made while preparing the quote.
We end off with informing the user of their next steps to complete the process of accepting this home insurance policy.
a majority of Blend's products currently live within the lenders' platform. With retargeting consumers, we also wanted to learn about how we could create touch points with the consumer, across Blend's different services, beyond the lenders' platform.
The first step was deciding how we could balance the cognitive load for the consumer, and lay down the information we are including to receive Security clearance.
I utilized sketches to test information hierarchy, leading us to develop a format that allows the consumer to move through each step in isolation for reduced cognitive load.
To gain insight as to what the user expectation would be throughout this workflow, and since content design played an important role in this project we wanted to be intentional about the language we used within the designs.
The process for finalizing an insurance quote requires a bit more screening from an agent, but we found 80% users expecting to purchase the policy after reviewing the quote.
This was expected since the typical mental model for a checkout experience follows this flow:
1. Choosing a product
2. Reviewing the product(s)
3. Purchasing the product
If this MVP is proven to be successful, there are a few areas I would want to advocate the team to invest in:
1. Optimizing for personalization in the insurance quote shopping experience to allow for real-time tailoring and price adjustments based on a consumer's needs.
2. Exploring other opportunity areas and trigger points for other Blend services to increase revenue and engagement with the Blend brand.
— Processes are messy! Designing in industry is not as linear as it can be in class projects, due to the multitude of decisions made by different partners of the project.
—Don't be afraid to ask questions. It was intimidating at first to step into my first industry role, but I was fortunate to be surrounded with supportive mentors and peers who helped me achieve a successful internship.
If you'd like to know more about my experience and other projects I worked on free to connect or chat with me!