Giving small business insurance new life.
Transforming an early-stage product initiative to drive growth, improve usability, and align with a new enterprise design strategy.
Client: USAA / NBVI
• UI/UX Lead
• Research & synthesis
• Strategy & facilitation
• Project coordination
My role
I’m a product designer with a product owner mindset. As a new team member, I stepped into a challenging environment with a small cross-functional team, helping guide business partners, development, content, digital governance, research, and accessibility experts through a discovery journey to uncover a new and improved USAA Small Business Insurance experience.
Opportunities
SBI was launched to meet our members’ small business needs in a sector with rapidly growing demand, which can be complex and overwhelming for new and seasoned business owners. USAA’s goal to deliver customizable, flexible insurance options faced significant challenges and high expectations among our stakeholders as we strived to expand the market footprint and product offerings.
The legacy design was originally created by a third party with brand inconsistency, poor accessibility (A11Y), scalability and general performance limitations. When these hurdles were coupled with business partners’ desire to launch new product offerings, it was time to modernize with an enterprise design system.
Strategy
I initiated conversations with our producer and director to encourage more strategic thinking and build a plan to work smarter—not harder. It was time to break old habits and lead with human-centered design practices.
Engage business leads to understand their insights, hopes, and concerns, helping foster a more collaborative atmosphere.
Audit the entire experience and map information architecture.
Research competitors, member analytics, MSR (member service reps) insights.
Develop a comprehensive roadmap and clearly articulate goals and timelines to set expectations and establish accountability.
Implement design sprints accompanied by rigorous review processes and formal sign-off milestones.
Challenges
Change is hard, particularly in corporate environments. But when communication is open and all stakeholders are brought into the design process, the result is a more engaging, insightful, and aligned experience.
External hurdles:
User attrition during acquisition and purchase flows.
Users with disabilities experienced difficulty navigating the system.
Low user comprehension and confidence, leading to frequent MSR calls.
Internal hurdles:
A traditionally siloed working environment with an inherent aversion to change and fear of the unknown.
Limited customer insight or rigorous user testing.
Waterfall vs agile mindset
Tackling democratic design
As a design lead, creating an environment where empathy is at the core of the process is key to making sure the design reflects real user needs. With so many stakeholders and cooks in the kitchen, I advocate asking lots of questions, breaking silos and introducing new ways of thinking (even if it’s uncomfortable).
Building foundations:
Create journey maps and IA flows where none existed.
Establish ongoing design and innovation sprints, workshops, and collaborative brainstorming sessions with business partners and accessibility experts to surface new insights, close gaps, and inform inclusive solutions.
Partner with our internal writing teams to refine content, improve comprehension and consistency across experiences.
Engage development teams early and often to improve alignment and identify potential red flags sooner.
Test & refine:
Conduct UserZoom testing and interviews, partnering with our in-house design research team to turn member feedback into clear, actionable improvements.
Iterate, review, refine, rinse, repeat
Internal testing: leverage our CDO teams across lines of business for feedback, insights, and guidance.
Establish a rigorous review process after development handoff to ensure adherence to internal design QA standards.
Enterprise design systems
Operate within design guardrails while advancing an evolving design library, setting and enforcing strict standards to deliver clean, bulletproof work.
Leverage flexible, out-of-the-box components and tailor them to support product-specific requirements.
Accelerate implementation by development teams to create more space for exploration, refinement, and QA.
Bring solutions and ideas back to the enterprise design team to enhance and continuously evolve the design library.
Partner with our enterprise teams to thoroughly review accessibility (A11y) and approve all work prior to development handoff.
Driving results & impact
Despite organizational pivots, constrained resources, and skeptical stakeholders over a lengthy implementation, we led the delivery of a dramatically improved digital experience that resonated with users and sustained a positive business revenue trajectory.
Delivered a faster, user-friendly, fully accessible (A11y) member experience designed to scale for future growth.
Supported and sustained consistent double-digit year-over-year revenue growth.
Reoriented the business around a customer-first mindset, with design leading the way.
Implemented best practices across product development to drive efficiency and improve collaboration.
Accelerated development cycles, improved code quality, and reduced technical debt backlog.