//China Life
Online insurance products managements website redesign
Project description
- China Life: Online insurance products managements website redesign
- Date: July 2012
- Project aim: China Life is one of the biggest insurance companies in China. They wanted us to introduce the concept of user-centered design to the development team. And we were requested to review and comment on the present website, conducted user research and provided an improvement suggestions.
- Personal Role: In charge of interaction and interface design, user experience design, working in a team of three students and two China Life employees.
New problems
- Since the development team did not have any user experience designer, they did not know if there was any usability problem in their current design.
- The development process was not user-centered. Before we joint them, the product was never tested on real users.
- The requirements were made ‘inside the company’ – there’s no user involved.
Design Process
- We went through the documents from the project manage team and conduct a heuristic evaluation for the current design, and listed the user experience problems we discovered.
- To make a better understanding of the user requirement, we requested for resources to conduct a user research. After the negotiation, we successfully conducted a questionnaire (focus on Internet users), and three interviews of real clients.
- According to the website evaluation and user research results, we made three redesign plan for the website and prototyped for the key features. We conducted small user testings and selected one solution from the three plans to implement.
- We also made a design document about further improvement suggestions according to the user feedback.
Redesign process
Design outcomes
Introduce the Concept of User-centered Design
- We noted that their former design process was regardless of user involvement. We organized some talks about usability, user experience design and user-centered design in the development team.
- We also conducted some user testings on the superiors. The aim was to make them understand what we were doing and how user-centered design could contribute to the product development.
Improved design process
Results and comments
- As a academic intern project, it won the excellent internship prize in department of industrial engineering, Tsinghua University.
- The development process became more user-centered, and the company had a better understanding of the importance of user experiment.
- Since it was the first time for me to work in the company, it developed my communication skills and management skills in practice. I found it important to have a mutual understanding with you colleagues and superiors. Having user testing on them was the most effective way we applied to introduce the User-centered design concept. Also, we might use methods like workshops or presentations depending on the resource and situation.