Demonstrating learn fast in a creative pitch
In September 2013, Mutual Life and Pensions provider Royal London invited my team to pitch for the design and build of their entire digital presence. This included the development of Royal London’s first ever business-to-consumer site for selling Life Insurance products. Rather than just tackle the brief from a creative point of view, we wanted to demonstrate how we bring the customer to the centre of the experience and how we use a learning based approach to evolve the best and right solution.
Understand the scenario of researching and buying life insurance
We wanted to do more than just present creative visuals of our ideas during the pitch, we wanted to bring the customer themselves into the pitch to show how we use research to inspire all of our ideas. We reached out to a consumer community partner to conduct a piece of video research with their community. Over a weekend, we asked a small group of potential customers to firstly tell us how they would research about life insurance, then to actually go through an application process of their choice and feedback on the experience.
Developing concepts for testing
Using this feedback from the community, we used our creative process (LESS, Listen, Explore, Sketch and Share) in a series of 25 minute design sprints to rapidly explore a number of possible ways to make a difference to the current experiences. The concepts explored three distinct ideas:
- Simple, using clear English to explain every step one at a time using progressive disclosure and the following question format: ask the question; explain why the question has been asked; then provide a simple way to answer.
- Speed, stripping out anything unnecessary to create the fastest possible journey with the minimal of input from the user.
- Creative, trying something radically different and introducing concepts like gamification to the process.
These were then paper tested internally with the wider team, before being developed into higher fidelity click through concepts.
Test and learn
The following weekend, we tested the three clickable concepts on the same potential customers. We not only asked them to feedback on the experience, we also asked them to compare it against the experience from the weekend before. As Royal London is a Mutual Life Insurance provider, we also asked if they felt more informed by the process and had confidence that the product that they were about to purchase was right for them. The process of including the customer in the creative process enabled us to discover a number of unique insights:
- Mobile is very important, every person used their mobile.
- Google comes first, and needs to be considered as the first part of the journey.
- Comparison sites are the go to place, and currently provide the best experience.
- Fast journeys don’t give confidence in the product being purchased.
- Being really simple and explaining things in an understandable way gave the best experience leading to a higher rate of conversions and more recommendations.
Bringing the customer to the pitch
Not only was the video feedback presented, the client also had the opportunity to test all the concepts on a number of mobile devices during the pitch itself, creating a much more interactive meeting. The results from the testing also influenced the creative design work presented to reflect some of the key learnings from talking to the customer.
