By making people the focus of your UX design, you can improve both efficiency and customer satisfaction
Key takeaways:
- Human-centered UX puts people at the center of the software development process
- Learn end users’ needs and pain points to provide better service
- By identifying real issues, you can develop real solutions
- Make sure your approach is desirable, feasible and sustainable
As a senior decision-maker, you are faced with the question: Why is UX insurance software important?
Yes, you fully understand the importance of digital solutions over manual processes for your insurance adjusting business, helping to boost efficiencies, decrease error rates, and let you scale up your business more smoothly. But now you are faced with looking at how improving user experience in insurance systems can benefit your operation.
Simply put, human-centered UX design improves your software performance and builds stronger bonds with your customers by putting people at the center of the development process.
As the Interactive Design Federation points out: “Human-centered design is vital because it ensures that we create solutions tailored to human needs, cultures, and societies. It is a discipline that emphasizes a people-centric approach, solving the right problems, recognizing the interconnectedness of everything, and not rushing to solutions.”
Read on to find out more about this essential UX design process, addressing common issues such as a lack of intuitive function in how your system connects with customers and a misplaced focus on expedience over user quality.
Understanding human-centered UX design
As the name suggests, human-centered UX design puts people at the forefront of the software development process, helping to provide services that resonate with your customers’ needs. Also known as a “human-centered design process” or “design thinking,” this approach to UX design involves keeping the end user’s needs, pain points, and preferences as the guiding light for every step of the software development process.
Some key principles when it comes to improving user experience in insurance systems include:
- Focusing on the end user: Since people are the key to successful UX design, you need to know your end users, investigate their demographics, familiarize yourself with customer personas and case studies, and, most of all, learn to empathize with their challenges and needs.
- Know the problem inside and out: To solve key challenges with an elegant software system, you must clearly identify what they are, doing adequate research before development.
- Keep it simple: While developing human-centered UX design may be complicated, the final result must be simple and compelling to encourage acceptance and uptake. Your user needs may be multifaceted, but your design solution has to be holistic and seamless.
- Test continually: To stay on track with your design process, you need to start testing early and throughout the design process to ensure it resonates with your target audience.
Benefits of human-centered UX for insurance adjusting software
There are many drawbacks to not updating your legacy system with a new, more efficient one using a human-centered UX. While your old system may have served you well before, it could now be past its best-before date, harming your insurance claims business by:
- Frustrating customers with inefficient processes
- Tying up your IT department with the need for constant software repairs
- Permitting too many errors
- Requiring replacement of outdated equipment
- Hindering your business growth.
By knowing the needs and pain points of your customers, you can create a system UX that:
- Is more efficient because it is designed with the end users in mind.
- Saves money because it permits fewer errors
- Builds customer loyalty and employee happiness with a system designed for their ease of use
- Attracts new clients as your business’s reputation for service grows
- Improves software performance because a good UX design is functional but lightweight, improving speed and responsiveness.
Implementing human-centered UX: key considerations
In implementing people-focused UX design, you need to start by asking what your end users want. Then you have to look at whether the solution you develop is technically feasible, sustainable, or financially viable.
This process begins with a lot of user and market research at the front end, understanding how your software solution will answer the needs of the people and the market. You can develop a more sophisticated and appealing approach by looking at and improving on the competitors’ solutions.
After identifying the problems you want to solve, it is time to ideate or brainstorm using innovative design thinking. Then, you enter the development phase, where you evaluate your ideas as far as desirability, feasibility, and viability.
Finally comes the implementation phase, where you successfully adopt the insurance claims software solution, making sure it does what it is supposed to do in a working setting.
Throughout the iterative design process, rigorous testing must be conducted to ensure the solution meets usability criteria and satisfies user needs, fully addressing the requirements identified at the front end of the process. You will have to make tweaks and changes as needed. User reviews and testing near the end of the process can help to iron out last-minute changes and deal with unexpected challenges.
Overcoming challenges in adopting human-centered UX
While the benefits of adopting human-centric UX design can be highly rewarding, you may first need to overcome old mindsets and ways of doing things.
Constraints might include a fear of experimenting or trying something new. Or budget constraints might stop you from investing in a user-centric approach to UX design. Sometimes, you might be too narrowly focused on making profits and getting to market as quickly as possible.
The greatest problem is when design is viewed as aesthetics only. It requires a mental shift to understand that design provides practical solutions to real problems so that properly conceived and implemented human-centered UX design can increase productivity and profitability. To understand and prove its worth to all stakeholders, you need metrics that show that the solution performs as promised.
Prioritizing UX for future software success
Putting people first in the design of your insurance technology solution is key to ensuring the efficiency and profitability of your system, putting in the groundwork for further growth and evolution. To properly prioritize UX for future software success, you need a highly adaptable partner with a proven record of success in the InsurTech industry.
This is where Susco comes in, with more than 70 years of collective experience with projects in the insurance industry. Contact us today for a full range of claims management systems and insurance services solutions.
You will receive a free one-hour assessment. We will be sure to put you first, so you can put people first in your insurance claims system.