MG

Michael Gallegly - Portfolio

Allstate - Life Sales Central

A full redesign and redevelopment of a legacy standalone application used by life insurance agents to quote policies for customers.

Overview

The Allstate Life Sales Central project was a year-long agile project aimed at designing a modern version of a tool used by field agents to model life insurance policies, offering them a vastly improved experience that is efficient, modern, and easier to use alongside customers.

The application marked a significant change in how field agents could run accurate quotes for customers in the field. Previously, they had only a desktop application available to them that lacked Internet connectivity, and often based quotes on out-of-date monetary values (such as interest rates). The new application was web-based and responsive.


Responsibilities & Tasks

  • Year-long involvement in an agile workflow alongside developers, a UX researcher, business stakeholders, and visual designers
  • Designed a responsive web application that replaced an out-of-date standalone software application
  • User interviews and scenario planning
  • Evaluation and analysis of multiple legacy systems
  • Creation of complex prototypes to test iterative design concepts
  • UX deliverables including user flows, conceptual wireframes, and functional wireframes
  • Significant opportunities to offer outside-the-box thinking to a massive application overhaul
  • Assisted in scoping and planning agile sprint stories

Project Logistics

To chart future release schedules, we evaluated the variety of improvements and features our business analysts had in the roadmap, then organized them around Allstate's enterprise-wide release schedule windows.

Day One Release
June, August, and October Release
December Release
Backlog Items for Future Release

User Journeys

User journeys were used at the outset to help analyze the relationship lifecycle between agent and customer, helping us identify pain points in the process. Ultimately, our focus centered on the quote portion of the journey.

User Flows

Users flows were created and used extensively to evaluate the variety of ways agents can navigate the application and individual quotes, helping us reduce complexity and provide logical pathways to key tasks they must complete.

Application User Flow
Term Conversion User Flow
This flow illustrates the flow users take when saving updates across the application.This flow illustrates the process with which customer names are passed through a centralized Allstate database, to determine whether or not their information can be pre-filled or not.
This flow illustrates the process with which customer names are passed through a centralized Allstate database, to determine whether or not their information can be pre-filled or not.

The Old Application

The original application was built several years ago on a .net platform. It was a standalone application with no web connectivity, and was plagued with inaccurate data when used in the field. Throughout our research and interviews with users, we uncovered an endless amount of pain points in how they interacted with the application. While the future application wasn't intended to be shared directly with customers, the old application made it nearly impossible to make any sense of quote options to customers as users modified them. In cases where agents would show the new interface to customers, making it easy for them to understand everything was one of our main goals.

Legacy Interface
Legacy Interface - Interest Rate Modeling
Legacy Interface - True Fit Feature

Application UI

Homepage
Mobile Version - Active Quote Page
Global Insured Page
The product landing page allows users to instantly see default quotes for all available products, edit details for them, and copy quotes.
This panel allows agents to work on behalf of other agents by searching for their agent number or network ID.
Within product pages, agents have a variety of tools per product to model quotes for customers. On this page, agents can review an extensive set of ledger values for products that pay out varying values.
In the older application, this functionality was fully exposed, leading to a cluttered, excessively lengthy page. In the new page, various options are condensed into accordions to limit options and improve cognitive load upon first viewing the page.
This page shows how customer details are presented when the customer exists in the Allstate ecosystem, offering agents the ability to edit details as needed. They can also select existing policies to convert to new policies.
True Fit Layering - Concept 1
True Fit Layering - Final Concept