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Allstate is large insurance provider headquartered near Chicago, IL. The company's focus is providing coverage for consumers across a variety of owned assets. Many divisions work together to provide the complex end-to-end service experience. Legal, underwriting, roadside assistance, technology providers, repair centers, and more.
However, a budding challenge facing the industry of private vehicle insurance is what happens if/when autonomous vehicles hit the road. Who will own the cars? Will consumers need insurance? How will insurance coverage function? And how is risk managed?
During my experience at Allstate, I worked as a UX Researcher on the New Products & Services Innovation team. This opportunity gave me the ability to work on some of these large, messy problems. We were tasked with exploring new concepts and revenue models for the business as the private car insurance industry evolves.
I was given the responsibility of running a new service design project that was positioned to bridge their current offerings of Roadside Assistance and connected-car initiatives. By collaborating with industry professionals, conducting in-field research, and developing website demand tests made for an impactful experience. Specifically, we succeeded in creating new, competitive intellectual property.
View our UXR best practices learned from this project and more. See 10 Components of a UXR Project Brief for how to easily outline all the major aspects of an UXR opportunity, and 3 So-what's to Develop Design Principles for how to maximize strategic impact from UX research insights.
Ethnographic interviews contextual interviews Quantitative surveys Financial modeling Lean startup application Rapid Prototyping low-fidelity service modeling workshop facilitation Usability testing evaluative testing IP development USPTO patent
Throughout the project, we took a lean approach to rapidly moving between primary/secondary research, concept generation, and concept prototyping in a 12-week design sprint. The project helped me gain experience in working across business functions in a large organization, as well as pitching ideas to executives and high-level stakeholders.
By the end of 12 weeks, we were running small-scale prototypes of the ideas in a lean manner to quickly understand what the pricing and business model would suit the concept. One of my greatest accomplishments was getting out of the building to test ideas with real potential users while gathering feedback and incorporating those changes.
A key insight / learning we had from our user research is most car owners don't want to know more about their car problems. Informing them about issues or repairs necessary is not value add. Similar to the inner workings of a computer, very few users want to know how their car works, or how to fix it. Better to offer a service that monitors, fixes, and provides interim transportation solutions to keep your life running smoothly. And if you don't actually own the car, then this service is better offered as a B2B solution to the fleet owner. Hence, the idea of autonomous car repair was born.
