StateFarm

STATE FARM

Team Lead Community Offers/Senior UX Architect

State Farm is a leading national insurance company. It has more than 58,000 employees, more than 19,000 independent contractor agents and services 83 million policies and accounts throughout the U.S.

Over the past almost 9 years I’ve been a member of StateFarm’s UX Digital Department focused on the enhancement of StateFarm.com and mobile application user experiences. I’ve served as the UX Team Lead/Architect for the StateFarm Mobile App team, Community Offers Program team, StateFarm.com Homepage and Landing pages team, Chat, Voice, and Emerging Technologies, and MyAccounts.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategy, User Research, Competitive Analysis, Workflows, Heuristic Evaluations, Wireframes and Prototypes, Creative Direction, Leadership Presentations

Community Offers
Redesigned Rewards Program

StateFarm had invested lots of time, energy, and resources into the Community Offers rewards program, however adoption by customers and merchants was slow. Research had shown, early attempts to innovate with a unique user experience and untested AI, had made usage more challenging than easy, further complicating adoption. How could an enhanced user experience and merchant portal help revive this flailing program?

Old Community Offers Mobile App Screens
Define the Problem

Why wasn't the program working? How could we improve it?

As the new UX lead of this team, it was important for me to gain insights of the existing program landscape. We began our Discovery phase with a Stakeholder review and follow-up heuristic evaluation of the mobile app and desktop responsive user experiences. We then conducted a competitive analysis by collecting and comparing data about competitors’ similar products and value propositions.

 

These methods were useful to examine, understand, and evaluate our direct and indirect competitors’ solutions, highlight products’ strengths and weaknesses to help us make informed decisions about our product and design strategy.

Follow the data

Along with the aid of research data from prior usability studies and the presentation of our competitive analysis, we were able to convince our business partners that significant usability and technology flaws needed to be addressed to improve performance metrics.

We proposed that a bottom-up reface was in order to address fundamental usability issues. The design was also outdated and needed to be updated to the existing corporate style guide and standards.

The outcome was expected to:

  • Increase user engagement
  • Improve user satisfaction
  • Make the program significantly more attractive to customers, merchants, and agents

I initiated thought working sessions. We employed various methods and activities to flush out ideas and prioritize efforts. Stakeholders from UX, business, data, and development were all influential in these sessions. This helped us facilitate a shared vision and alignment on goals and next steps.

Thinking
Competitive Analysis Presentation Sample
Landing Screen List
Competitive Analysis Presentation Sample
Landing Screen List Competitors
Design

Wireframes & Visual Design

With a solid understanding of our short-term and long-term goals, I started with user flows of the existing desktop and mobile experiences. We shared these flows with business shareholders which helped us map out a plan of execution. Stories were created, added to an Agile board, and planned during project sprint cycles.

 

Over the following weeks and months, we turned ideas into rough Freehand board sketches, which became wireframes. Throughout this process, we shared designs with shareholders to get their input. Updates were made based on this feedback.

 

After wireframes were approved, visual design mockups were created following UX design style guidelines. This ensured proper usage of colors, typography, icronography, ect.

 

Mobile App Map
Community Offers App Map
Mobile App Wireframes
Wireframes

Test, Evaluate, and Improve

Internally, we felt our new design was a dramatic improvement and the application would perform much better for users, merchant, and agents. However, to test some of our assumptions, we put together clickable prototypes and worked with our Customer Insights department to design usability studies. These studies were conducting in our Chicago usability lab and my team virtually monitored them from Atlanta.

 

The results of our studies provided us with valuable insight we were able to use to enhance the solution. Approved designs were delivered to our development team to implement. We worked closely with our Product team and developers to maintain the integrity of the designs as well as to support their questions and/or concerns. Occasionally, mid-development design adjustments were necessary due to practicality or time constraints.

Test and Evaluate
New Community Offers Mobile App Screens