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Launchpad
IXT is a modern core system designed to empower insurance companies with efficient speed, security, and flexibility to integrate with third-party applications. It helps the insurance industry create an ecosystem with the latest technology. Essentially, IXT serves as a B2B SaaS that caters to insurance professionals, but ultimately benefits insurance consumers in the market. In today's competitive market, insurance companies need to launch their products quickly to reach the market effectively.
In a competitive market, insurance companies strive to launch their products quickly to reach the market as fast as possible. However, during collaborations with insurance companies, OD discovered that some companies lacked the resources to efficiently and securely launch a new insurance product to consumers through digital channels.
SME insurance companies often do not have the resources needed to launch a digital insurance product efficiently and securely.
To quickly reach the market, the users not only need to design the insurance product quickly, but also launch a website with a complete purchase flow for customers to buy insurance online. This is especially critical for certain types of insurance, such as vaccine insurance, which have a simple structure but are highly sensitive to time. Insurance companies usually lack the IT resources to support rapid website deployment. However, the IXT system does not yet provide value for accelerating the process after the user has finished setting up the insurance product itself.
For the existing partner, OD can save resource to maintain, too
Even for existing partners, OD wants to save development resources by providing a platform for insurance companies to update trivial content such as copy renewal themselves. Since those sites were customized & developed, insurance companies are not able to do anything without the help from OD.
As the UX designer, I proposed and aligned the structure with PMs & stakeholders. And then designed the information hierarchy of the product, designed the user flows, and created wireframes and interaction specs. I collaborated with the UI designer to ensure alignment with the product vision and worked with the development team to ensure practicality.
Product goals > Structure > flows > wireframes > behavior specs
Since it's a new product, the UX designer is actually facilitating in the whole developing process to make sure that Launchpad is actually cater the value we expected, and able to solve identified users pain points.
The new product has been named as Launchpad, since it is:
A service that is able to synced with core system and helps users to launch a website with the latest product fast.
The whole design of the launchpad have several major goals at the first stage:
To provide the ability to launch a website has pages that make up a full purchase flow.
To ensure future flexibility to compose websites with different kinds of user flows by using templates and components from Launchpad independently. However, at the first stage, we are targeting to provide purchase templates.
To enable users to edit each component using the panel to fulfill different requirements and differentiate their website from others.
To allow users to manage and update the content on their own whenever needed.
Therefore, the launchpad is designed as an editor with 2 layers of library:
Flows template: that launchpad provides different kinds of template for different usages. Such as simple purchase flow, lottery campaign, or purchase with different steps sequence based on insurance.
Each page would composed by various components that would usually used by an insurance website that users are still able to customize the content.
Launchpad appears to be another no-code editor/CMS service. However, the biggest advantage of using Launchpad is the synergy it provides by being integrated with IXT, the core system. As a result, information is connected smoothly and with greater security compared to using a third-party service.
Here are some more design detail highlights that not only provide value in Launchpad but also empower IXT as well:
One Independent Editing space
The first design detail I would like to mention is the editing space. Although it may not be the most innovative feature, the IXT design system has always lacked a pattern that enables users to edit across different pages in one step, without leaving the edit mode. This pattern is similar to a set of web pages or an insurance product, and is useful when editing is done all at once. In this scenario, saving before jumping among pages is annoying and unnecessary since users are still editing. The editing space empowers IXT to reuse this pattern when users are editing different pages all at once.
Right edit panel
The second design improvement pertains to the right panel in the editor. In the IXT design system, editing without changing the page was often done through a popup modal or by expanding the section within the same area. Popup modals would block the selected object and had limited space for complex controls or editing fields. In contrast, turning the selected section into edit mode would sometimes distract users from necessary fields due to an excessive amount of information on the same page. Therefore, the right panel provides an ideal solution where users can easily identify the component they are editing, while the right panel provides ample space for more complex editing behaviors. Furthermore, the panel can be collapsed or expanded, making it more flexible for users.
Theme color settings
The third feature I designed enables users to set the theme color for the entire website at once. This has two main benefits: first, it speeds up the process of differentiating the brand colors from others. Second, at this stage, we limit the flexibility of changing the color of each component since SMEs may not have enough resources to check for awkward color matches. Therefore, a centralized color management system is more practical and sufficient for the first stage.
It was a new product line for OneDegree Global. ODG was focusing on B2B internal platform system, and it’s the first product line to help our client to reach to the customers directly.
Note for myself. the core value of a new product should be repeatedly mentioned within the team at the early stage to ensure the direction is aligned and still focus.
OneDegree Global launched a new product line to help their clients reach their customers directly, which was a departure from their focus on B2B internal platform systems. To ensure the success of this new product, it was crucial to stay focused on the priority problem to solve and strike a balance between practicality, comprehensiveness, and ease of use for a new product.
Despite this approach, the team was able to achieve more features than planned, such as version control for campaign purposes and a reusable component/template library that enables users to share designs across teams and organizations.
But also, there're some points that I wished we have more time to refine and polish if we have more time or on the next iteration if I were able to:
Language & i18n issue, that we only address with the simplest method due to resource limit. However, i18n issue is a much more complicated if it's used by an international organization.
Launchpad has integrated with IXT, and also take IXT's product version into consider. However, the structure here is way too complicated. Would need a improvement on how to manage different level of information and simplify the structure for each website editing.
Last but not least, at the time of the Launchpad's release, there was no feedback or data from real users yet since it was a new product that had not been used by any of OD's clients. However, by providing this platform, it should be able to help insurance companies reduce their product launching duration from 3-6 months to just 1-2 months for a more simple product in total. Additionally, it can also help them avoid all the communication costs with vendors when updating new information.
