New insurance portal for British Friendly

British Friendly sells income protection insurance products. As part of a back-office system replacement programme, we designed their new customer, staff and adviser portals. The project was in collaboration with software vendor EXL and fintech consultants Altus.

Initial planning

British Friendly’s business requirements were expressed as 1000+ user stories. The first exercise was to analyse, map, and translate these user stories into workable digital journeys for customers, advisers, and staff. Close collaboration was required with users and the system vendor to ensure that tested design schemes could be configured on the new system.

Commenting on the collaboration, Guy Williams, Director Sales & Marketing at EXL Service said,

"Pancentric has impressive design and technical capabilities. Our teams spoke the same language and collaborated effortlessly. A delight to work with."

Our approach

The initial phase of the design project was dedicated to organising and mapping the user stories, clarifying where design interventions were required.

Tools like Miro were used to share and iterate functional flows and user story maps with the client and other stakeholders. We also observed users to understand current workflows, operational pain points, and workarounds.

Design development

As a functional digital design project, a strong emphasis was placed on information hierarchy, template structure, responsive grids, and reusable, consistently applied components. Static concepts were developed and iterated and then road-tested in early prototypes. Once the core design system was refined, a full, high-fidelity prototype was developed, in line with user story priorities agreed in the planning phase. Axure was our preferred prototyping tool due to the scope & complexity of the required prototype which featured 100s of journey steps and 1000s of interactions. A cross-section of screens is shared below showing the design system applied across the customer and adviser portals.

“Our advisor quote and buy journey was a major inhibitor to growth. Together with Pancentric, we designed a vastly superior customer experience that simplified and increased the speed of transactions."

Mike Myers, CEO British Friendly Society

Example screens showing quote generation and underwriting:

A large button convention was used to make answering questions and making product/pricing selections easy on desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Note: The far left-hand menu shows the Axure prototype page index.

Head-to-toe medical underwriting questions fed & branched questions to users using an accordion system. A secondary progress bar system on the right-hand side of the page helped users understand sections completed and still to complete.

Example screens showing admin portal

Primary navigation is provided across the top of the screen with additional options and functions in-page below.

Note: The far left-hand menu shows the Axure prototype page index.

Front-end toolkit & roll-out

Once the prototype was completed, Pancentric produced a front-end components library that the system vendor utilised as part of their new platform configuration. Phase 1 of the roll-out went live in February 2021 with further phases planned over subsequent months.

Commenting on the design & prototyping work, Nic Herbert, Head of Technology & Change at British Friendly Society, said;

"We've always been impressed with Pancentric's ability to translate complex business requirements into highly usable design schemes. The quality of the prototyping work has been excellent on this project and has enabled our senior leaders, IT team, and system vendor to have a clear - and common - understanding of future system development and ambitions".