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A New Home for Warranties

A dated, unintuitive system for creating and selling home warranties had become untenable for this client. I helped overhaul the design of the portal to reduce calls, increase usage, and drive up sales.

As a leading home warranty provider, this client services more than 2 million customers via a massive network of home service professionals.

skills
  • Design Thinking
  • Information Architecture
  • UX Research
  • UI / UX Design
  • UX Writing
  • Data Visualization
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • Sketch App
soft skills
  • Empathy
  • Leadership
  • Communication
  • Collaboration
Some identifying information has been omitted from these case studies in order to comply with contractual agreements.
The Problem

The client wanted the real estate agents in their network to include one-year home warranties in their transactions, but the portal built for that purpose wasn’t facilitating that process well enough.

It was convoluted, difficult to navigate, and didn’t serve account executives who needed a place to manage multiple territories. Usage was lagging, with some agents preferring to phone in their orders, creating a backlog. The experience was in dire need of a usability upgrade.

my role

The key to this project, we quickly discovered, was a ground-up redesign of the information architecture.

We started with wireframes to explore different ways to organize and connect different types of actions and tasks. Order creation and management were the biggest priorities of the redesign. I worked closely with the client and their user proxies to understand the business logic involved in each sale, while ensuring that the focus of the project remained on creating a better end user experience.

For a dashboard this size, wireframes were an absolute must to help understand the scope of the experience while quickly testing out new ideas.

To improve usage, we needed users to feel comfortable whether they were using this tool once a week or once a quarter. One thing we really honed in on was the flow for creating a new order, a core feature of the site. Under the skin, the flow is essentially one long form–but in the new designs, I presented it as a guided, step-by-step process to reduce the cognitive load on the user. We also added the ability to save your work and continue later, anticipating that many users may not have time to complete the full journey in one sitting.

While some of the dashboard’s processes are long, we found that breaking them down into steps and allowing the user to save their progress lightened the cognitive load and led to more submissions.

A secondary role, Account Executive, also needed to be taken into consideration. AE’s could see details of dozens of orders across multiple territories, with each order containing a lot of information and key actions to take. Using the client’s existing design system, I built this part of the dashboard with a close eye on text hierarchy and legibility, striving to keep everything visually organized so as not to be overwhelming.

In information dense layouts such as this, I always pay special care to the vertical rhythm of the page.
the results

The implementation of the new portal had an immediate impact. Traffic increased, call volume decreased, and mobile usage went up as a result of the new responsive design. 

And most importantly, sales of home warranties went up. It was a major win for the client and helped bolster our working relationship for future projects.

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