BriteCore
During the development of BriteClaims v1, conversations with our users (claims adjusters) revealed a key need: the ability to easily track tasks related to customer insurance claims.
Without a built-in task management feature, adjusters struggled to stay organized and work efficiently.
What if adjusters could manage all their claim-related tasks in one place?
What if task tracking was seamlessly integrated into their existing workflow?
What if the system could help prevent things from slipping through the cracks?
What if staying organized didn’t require switching tools or adding overhead?
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
3 months
Impact
User-validated enhancement to the claim adjustment workflow
To kick off the project, I brought our product team together (product owner, engineers, and myself as the designer) for an assumption declaration session.
This exercise helped us align on our early vision for the feature and surface key ideas to validate with users, allowing us to move forward with clarity and shared understanding.
Kicking off with clear assumptions creates a shared understanding of the feature from day one. To build effectively, teams need alignment on what they’re building, and why.
Using whiteboarding while building a hypothesis allows the entire team to have input. Which is again, vital to creating a shared understanding.
With our assumptions on the table, we collaboratively distilled them into a clear hypothesis:
We believe claims adjusters need a way to track tasks so that they can ensure proper protocol has been followed and claims get closed
To support this need, we will build task tracking functionality into the claims system with features like:
The ability to add tasks
A filterable list of tasks
We will know this hypothesis is correct if end users workflow is enhanced by this feature and made more efficient and less error prone.
With our hypothesis in hand, we set out to validate our assumptions with real users.
We sent a survey to targeted claims adjusters, focusing on the functionality we had assumed was valuable, asking users whether they’d find these features useful in a future task management tool.
The responses gave us a clear view into which features mattered most, such as:
Due dates
Task tagging
Priority levels
This feedback was incredibly helpful for prioritizing features going into the design phase.
Surveys don't give you a lot of depth, but they allowed us to quickly canvas our assumed feature list to potential users to help prioritize and validate.
While survey responses were coming in, we also conducted user interviews to dive deeper into how adjusters currently track tasks, their pain points, and what they wanted from a future solution.
A recurring insight emerged: several participants mentioned that having a calendar integrated into the task tracker would be incredibly helpful. This insight became a key influence in shaping our design direction.
"I'd like to be able select a task on my calendar and drill down directly into the claim."
"I want a task list with a calendar to live entirely in the claims sytem. If it overlaps with my Outlook / Gmail, then that's ok, but mostly I want it in the claims system."
Where surveys allow you to go wide but not deep, interviews allow you to dig deep and really get to know your user's needs and pain points.
Wireframing works better as a collaborative activity. Good ideas will come from every area in your team. As a designer, your job is to refine ideas.
When starting the wireframing process, I invited the product owner and engineers into collaborative wireframing sessions. These sessions were invaluable for building a shared understanding of how we wanted to approach the feature.
One technique I used was encouraging the team to use screenshots of other tools to inspire and guide our rough wireframes.
For example, a team member experimented with the idea of having a task list alongside a calendar by using a screenshot of Google Calendar next to a rough task list layout.
After refining our wireframes, I was ready to polish the design and explore interactions for the tasks feature.
I used Figma to create higher-fidelity mockups and leverage its prototyping tools to showcase how the feature should interact.
The final design includes three key components:
Search bar / header
Task list
Filter menu
The tasks feature is accessible from a sliding right sidebar, allowing users to view tasks without losing context in the claim file.
A prototype is a fantastic design artifact. It's user testable, stakeholder reviewable and gives engineers great building reference.
Getting feedback on our design with real users in real time put us in a good place to ensure we were on the right track before moving into the development phase.
Before moving into development, we tested the polished design with end users. We shared the prototype with our focus group and asked participants whether it included all the necessary elements for successfully tracking tasks.
Based on their feedback, we made a few adjustments. We reworked the calendar component to focus on date ranges instead of a full calendar view and clarified the logic around task completion and cloning.
First Click Testing
We conducted a first click test with the same audience as our initial survey to evaluate the usability and discoverability of the design. One task asked users to click where they believed they could complete an open task, and around 30% of users clicked on the batch selection item.
This insight led us to add a batch completion feature that wasn’t initially part of the design.
With these findings in hand, our team was ready to start building the first development version. I wrote the necessary stories and added them to our backlog for development.
First click testing in conjunction with usability testing gives you a clear picture of if your designs are performant and meeting users expectations.
Following our design process, we achieved:
Strong shared understanding across the product team on what the task tracking feature needed to be.
A testable hypothesis to guide development.
Validation of our hypothesis through user feedback and data.
A prototype evaluated for usability by end users.
Stories written for development to build the feature.
In early 2021, we launched the tasks feature in BriteClaims. The response from users was enthusiastic, with many noting how the feature streamlined their claims process and helped them close claims faster.
