The Claims Landscape

The UX claims team I led consisted of the following roles:


As the UX team lead across all claims products, I was responsible for guiding the creation and evolution of all customer and internal associate facing experiences. The team designed products enabling electronic first notice of loss (eFNOL) for auto claims, eFNOL for property claims, and the tracking of a claim’s progress. The ability to track a claim was a completely new customer facing capability that provided visibility into a claim’s progress from initial submission through final payout. All three of these products also had digital counterparts enabling associates to facilitate the first notice of loss process and track a claim’s progress


Transitioning From a Third-Party Consultancy

Before I came to Nationwide I had the unique experience of transitioning UX work from a third party consultancy and bringing that design work in-house. This experience taught me about the technical and logistical complexities involved, but more importantly the sensitive nature of the situation as work is transitioned away from a group that designed the products from the ground up. I spent my first six months at Nationwide working with Deloitte to transition UX ownership of a subset of claims products to my team at Nationwide. Some key transition items included:


I also worked with Deloitte to ensure that their previous two years of product knowledge and deliverables were thoroughly documented and understood by the Nationwide UX team.


Establishing the UX Team

Nationwide UX had fallen into a support role for the consulting group Deloitte over the course of multiple years, and the majority of the design team was unfamiliar with what directly supporting a dev team looked like within the organization. Developers, business partners, and the product team were also unaware of how to best utilize an in-house fully allocated UX design team. I established many recurring practices including:


I also introduced UX content and research representation into team design reviews to ensure that as work progressed the strategy for content and research was considered and reassessed regularly. I also worked with the scrum team in coordinating and facilitating a two day team building workshop to acclimate the group to this new team composition and give everyone the opportunity to express ideas to strengthen the team moving forward.  I also owned and maintained planning across multiple lines of business, multiple products, known dependencies, and multiple spans of time. This continuous plan ownership and socialization was integral to the UX claims team’s success. 

quarterly multi-product plan

annual multi-product plan

epic feature focused plan

Developing a Communications Strategy

The communication touch points with customers across the claims experience at Nationwide were fragmented and inconsistent both from a content perspective and visual presentation. Each product had a unique communications identity and approach. I led the UX team in evaluating all existing claims communications, identifying gaps and excessive communication, and devising a strategic framework for communications moving forward. This wholistic redesign included:


Claims had a robust content strategy across digital products and this was the opportunity to realize that strategy within all communications. Multiple efforts enabled the UX team to complete this work:

journey map email inventory and visioning

email communication sprint process

text communication revision example

new email communication

new email communication

Creating a Product Ecosystem

The Nationwide claims digital ecosystem presented many opportunities for tighter product integration. Some improvement efforts I led the UX team through included:


revised flow transition between eFNOL and tracker 

revised confirmation screen encouraging tracker utilization

revised loss description providing additional guidance

journey indicating options for collecting a loss description

auto first notice of loss precedent for property redesign

Creating a Business Case For New Product Work

The UX and product teams had identified a strong candidate for a redesign, the property first notice of loss experience. This effort was 36 months out on the product roadmap, but preliminary UX moderated and unmoderated research efforts along with analytics indicated a strong need to refresh the experience. Issues ranged from basic usability issues, lack of functionality before transitioning to an associate, and slow performance. With the support of the product team UX lead the charge to create a business case to fund this work. The first step was socializing MVP and goal state proposals including timelines and ultimately design concepts

property first notice of loss MVP and goal state

property first notice of loss MVP timeline

Since an electronic first notice of loss (eFNOL) experience already existed for property claims, the first step was to evaluate the current state and build a business case. Key steps included:






design thinking process approach

When demonstrating a design uplift across the eFNOL property experience multiple considerations fed into the revised design. Considerations included:


original screen example

proposed enhancements example