Broker Buddha's Collaborative Assign Questions Tool
Time Frame
September - December 2022
Roles
1 Product designer (me), director of product, 2 PMs, and a dev team
Tools
Overview
Who is Broker Buddha?
Broker Buddha is an insurance tech company that is essentially the TurboTax for insurance brokers. Broker Buddha parses through pdfs and physical intake forms from broker’s clients and digitizes those forms into an online form. Sharing a huge ACORD form can now be shared in an instant without having to dig through your email, or worse, your fax machine 😖. (This isn’t a joke by the way. Older agents still use fax and it makes every dev and product designer die a little bit on the inside.) Also, no more answering duplicate questions as all forms are turned into their proprietary smart forms.
Assign Questions Tool
When a form is digitized, the broker has general knowledge about their client and could fill some information in. However, what will most likely happen is the insurance broker will assign their client questions. From there, the client can then delegate permissions on particular questions, sections, or overall forms. A collaborative tool where brokers and clients can collaborate on intake forms was needed.
Design Process
Business Goals
- Improve the turnaround time of clients finishing forms so agents can focus on submissions
- Let brokers know that their voices are being heard after needing many feature improvements to the 1.0 version
- Win new and extend deals with agencies to generate more revenue
Target users
Insurance brokers
Insurance clients
User Research
Research methods
Because Broker Buddha didn’t have a product designer, PMs conducted interviews with agents and clients alike. These sessions were recorded and I was able to gather a lot of great insights.
Research goals
The PMs that conducted the interviews wanted to answer the following questions.
- What do agents want to accomplish by assigning questions to their clients?
- What is the main motivation for clients to assign questions to their co-workers?
- Do clients have any concerns about permissions?
How Might We Questions
How might we notify users to complete their work in a delightful way?
How might we display a user's progress in the most efficient way?
User Problems and Research Findings
Agents want to assign to assign work to 1-2 clients and have the clients delegate work – for the agent, all of this tedious data entry work is holding up their submission process which means less time making money or earning new business.
Clients and agents want to see a dashboard of work in progress – Clients want to see where their co-workers are at with any questions assigned to them. Brokers want to see this as well and be able to send them nudges to remind them of questions that need answers.
Clients who delegate work want to see who is assigned what questions – Clients expressed that this helps them understand what they should and shouldn’t be answering. Also, sometimes other people's answers provide clarity and context for someone else's questions and answers.
Problem Statement
Clients and brokers alike want to speed up their form-filling process by being able to see who needs to finish answering their questions. And right now, they need to check in with their co-workers and clients to remind them.
Design Decisions
Q. What might be the best way to display that clients have been assigned questions?
Answer: Outlining questions that pertain to users has proven a bit successful but I believe adding an avatar icon in tandem with outlining the question would work a bit better. Users would see the avatar they’ve set for themselves next to questions that are assigned to them. They would also see questions that are assigned to others with their avatar icon respectively.
Q. Who should have dashboard permissions?
Answer: Creating roles for clients would have to be set in place. Thus client admins would have such permissions. Other roles would be assigners and answerers. Assigners cannot view the dashboard but can assign questions to others and see what questions other users have. Assignees can only answer questions and see a summary of their answers once they’ve completed all tasks.
Q. What’s the best way to notify users about work they need to complete?
Answer: Client admins should be able to send an email reminder to users who haven’t completed their work. This would be a template that we would build for them but they could edit it within their own account settings. The CTA to send an email reminder would live in the assignee dashboard underneath their respective progress card.
Design Solution
A clear preview of assignees in the header
When users are assigned questions, a preview of up to 3 avatars is put in the header. Users can then click to view their assignee dashboard.
Easy to scan cards to understand where their co-workers are in their progress.
When our PMs spoke with agents and clients, they all expressed that there are times when all they want to do is just go in and check on the status. I thought a great way to give them the information they needed was a progress bar followed by a percentage and a completion rate (1 of x.)
See what your co-worker has answered, or unanswered, and send them an email reminder if necessary.
Summary of your own progress and who you assigned questions.
Takeaways
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to implement my designs at broker buddha as I and a couple of other co-workers were let go. Although my time was short at Broker Buddha, it taught me so much about the start-up world, the complicated problems of the insurance world, and how to manage my time in a fast-paced world.