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Context
Lead Designer on a government-mandated redesign of the National Flood Service (NFS) Flood Portal — responsible for discovery research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design.
Problem
Flood insurance customers were losing coverage due to payment friction and lack of online access to their policy documents. Carriers were absorbing the cost in agent and CSR time.
Options Considered
Build a single account covering all user journeys or sequence delivery by impact and complexity. Given a compressed timeline, a phased approach was chosen — starting with the highest-impact, lowest-friction problem first: online premium payments.
Trade-offs
Prioritizing payments and claims meant document access came last, even though it was a government mandate. Aligning design milestones to development sprints and meeting daily with engineers ensured the mandate was met without sacrificing the higher-impact journeys.
Outcome
Met the NFIP government mandate and reduced payment lapses on policy renewals by 15%, freeing agents and CSRs to focus on more complex issues.
What I'd do next:
Extend the remaining claim status journeys that was handed off to the internal NFS team, and add a QR code to the renewal notice that was identified as a future milestone during delivery.
Discovery & Design
Discovery & Design
Used Miro to conduct an online workshop with subject matter experts (SMEs) from the customer service, marketing, and operations departments. Together, we created Scenario and Affinity Maps to investigate service challenges.
Pain points
Pain points
Vision
Vision
UI sketches
UI sketches
Proposed concept
Proposed concept
Iterative delivery
Iterative delivery
With our shortened deadline, we needed to deliver quickly and that paying premiums was the most important and easiest problem we could solve. During this phase, I presented designs and gathered feedback at weekly product review sessions, and met daily with engineers to guide development.
Mapping design journeys to development milestones
Mapping design journeys to development milestones
Renewing a policy
Filing a claim
Accessing documents
Why start with payments and claims?
Maintaining flood policies and filing claims are key tasks for insureds and carriers, whereas documents are already provided via snail mail.
Forcing insureds to keep track of an online account to pay coverage or file a claim would add friction to our goal of reducing calls for agents and CSRs.
Journey 1: Renewing a policy
Journey 1: Renewing a policy
Enable insureds to understand their renewal options, and pay for their flood insurance.
Slideshow
Provide them with key information about their renewal and access to make a secure online payment.
Insureds receive their renewal notice in the mail; most pay by check or phone.
Now, they would also pay online by referencing a link on the renewal notice. (Future milestone to include a QR code)
By observing e-commerce best practices, we recognized that insureds needed to:
Trust we will not misuse their email address and only use it for payment confirmation
Understand they would be redirected to a third-party website to make a payment
And know whether their payment was successful or not
Journey 2: Filing a claim
Journey 2: Filing a claim
Enable insureds to file a claim while keeping their personal information safe.
Slideshow
As this process was initiated without a password-protected account, we needed the system to record claim-specific contact details without overriding this information on their policy.
And, because filing a claim included sensitive information, we decided to 'obfuscate' (obscure) some PII data.
For data obfuscation, we collaborated with our internal security team to defined the following rules:
First Name: Use 4 standard asterisks after the first letter
Email Address:
Use 10 standard asterisks between the first and last char of the email username
Use 4 standard asterisks for the mail server name (between the '@' sign and the top-level domain '.com').
Phone Number:
Replace all but the last 4 characters with asterisks while keeping parenthesis and dash chars for format hinting
Note: Claim status journeys were later completed by an internal NFS team.
Journey 3: Accessing documents
Journey 3: Accessing documents
Enable insureds to provide proof of flood coverage for their lender and avoid calling their agent or a customer service representative (CSR).
Slideshow
Provide the following capabilities through an online account so they can download their coverage documents.
Use their email address as their username for easier recall when signing in
Surface password format requirements as helper text
Provide an unmask password option
Link to existing flood policy to complete the account
Enable password reset
Provide downloadable PDF documents (starting with the 2 most recent Policy Declaration Pages for MVP)
Coordinate with Customer Service Department to determine top 3 to 5 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) with link to all FAQs.
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