Emma-by-AXA-App | ux.ellentimothy

AXA HK, 2018 - 23

Scalable Insurance App: From One Smooth UX Flow to Many, Designed Without Enough Domain Expertise.

My Tasks: User Research, Product Design, Design Strategy, Usability Testing

Case study: Emma by AXA app

Overview

Project Background

In today’s world, insurance apps are often viewed as self-service platforms that help customers who don’t have an insurance agent that they can easily file claims and manage policies. Emma by AXA has redefined its value proposition and positioned it as a holistic one-stop insurance and health-being managing platform.

My Role

UX/UI Manager and customer engagement design lead
Lead the Product Design of Emma by AXA app at AXA Hong Kong.

Objective

We aim to design scalable applications for diverse insurance products. The app is the flagship platform, and Hong Kong is the first pilot.

Our users are from Hong Kong, Macau, China and Taiwan. It covers a wide range of insurance services: employee benefits, life and health insurance, savings and investments, and general insurance.

Challenge

Diverse Insurance Lines and Complex User Needs

The app needed to support three insurance categories, each with distinct workflows:

Group Medical: Employee benefits insurance.
Life Insurance: Pure life, life & health, and savings & investment policies.
General Insurance: Travel, motor, domestic helper, home, and personal accident insurance.

For example, claim journeys for Employee Benefits differed significantly from General Insurance claims.

Integration of Legacy Data

AXA had acquired several companies over the years, resulting in various policy number formats.
Inconsistent type of primary key to identify the user. e.g. the database from department A and B were using policy no. as the primiary key while department C was using MemberID.
Need to migrate the users from previous app "MyAXA" to the new app.

Technical Limitations

Frontend:
- Developers came from multiple vendor companies.
- No design system for technical side to keep the structure standard of same components, which led to high maintainability costs in the app's early stages.
Backend:
- Multiple data systems store user information
- Need time to adjust the API for faster loading.

Design Constraints: Limited Time and Resources Affecting the Understanding of Differences Across Business Line

The strategy of product scaling up:

1st half of Year 1: Employee Benefits.
2nd half of Year 1: Expand to Life & Savings Insurance.
Year 2: Enable market place, value added services and contact information change
Year 3: Onboard General Insurance users, and value added services
Year 4: CMS revamp

As a result, business analysts could only study one line of business at a time, making design decisions more challenging.

Product Design Strategy

Enabling Convenience Digital Insurance Features to Elevant Perceived Value

Enabled full digital insurance services features for Employee Benefits and Life & Investment users in the first two years:
- Find Doctors & Claim Services
- Policy Managing Services: Enable Change Contact information, Review Policy
- In App Notifications for Claims, Events
Automated claims processing for Employee Benefits allowed direct settlements with qualified documents, retaining many users.
Enable Premium Rebate Program: AXA Goal, to reward policyholders who had completed 10,000 daily steps on certain amount of days.

Lean and Scalable UI Design

In the first 2 years, for processes requiring user authentication, I advocated for minimalist designs to reduce the workload for frontend developers.
This allowed developers to focus on building a unified API for user identification, enabling future integration across multiple databases (e.g., group insurance, individual insurance, and general insurance).

High effort on creating account journey

Streamline signup flows and reduce steps to minimize barriers for users:
1. Split the create account journey into 2 steps: create an account & find a policy. Users are not compulsory to connect the insurance policy during the create account journey while connecting the policy when they want to use the insurance services.
2. Proactively remind users to activate the account via Email/SMS.
Enable biometric authentication for users to log back into their accounts.

Unifying Interfaces and Features

E.g. Standardize UI of claim processes across EB and individual insurance as much as possible.

•Increased the reusability of components

•Reducing development complexity

Implementing Atomic Design & pushing for a design system

I adopted the Atomic Design methodology, starting with small components like buttons and input fields, which were then assembled into reusable page modules. This improved efficiency in both design and development.
I worked closely with IT teams to establish a Design System and Storybook, ensuring consistency across interfaces while enhancing development efficiency.

Second Generation of Emma by AXA

In 2022, I began redesigning the second-generation Emma by AXA homepage. Using years of GA data, I re-analyzed the homepage structure and incorporated features like reminders, insurance tools, cross-selling channels, and educational content for the public.

We also noticed that users rarely utilized certain health services.

During user interview, we found that some services didn’t align with customer needs, others were underused because their names failed to clearly convey their purpose. Although some service names couldn’t be changed due to agreements with partners, I redesigned the My Services page based on usage scenarios and functionality. The current design what you see in the phone now is still keeping my original style and design ideas.