Medical liability insurer
Clarifying insurance content and paths to conversion
A full-site UX audit, revised information architecture, and eight responsive templates for a medical professional liability insurer’s website.
Role
Lead UX Designer (sole UX practitioner)
Team
CX strategist
UI designer
2 content strategists
2 business analysts
SEO strategist
Third-party development team
Timeline
About 4 months
Discovery and research: ~1 month
UX design and testing: ~2 months
UI design and handoff: ~1 month
Tools
Figma, Miro, Otter.ai
Platform
Responsive website
Overview
Project at a glance
TL;DR
Client background
The client is a medical professional liability insurer that provides coverage, risk-management services, and educational resources to healthcare professionals and organizations. Its public-facing website supports prospective customers, current policyholders, agents, job seekers, and other audiences seeking information about the company.
Goal
Redesign the website around clear audience needs and conversion pathways while creating a flexible, component-based system that could support future content and business growth.
Audit
Audit, design principles, and priorities
Evaluating the existing experience
We began with a comprehensive audit of the existing website, reviewing content structure, navigation and findability, user journeys and conversion pathways, accessibility, responsive behavior, and visual consistency.
The audit found images missing alt text, article pages missing H1 headings, and company and community pages that would benefit from plainer language. We also recommended clear and unique in-text links, a consistent page structure, and page titles that match the navigation.
The audit identified where the existing experience created unnecessary effort and where prospective customers were most likely to lose momentum. It also established a shared foundation for conversations with client stakeholders about business priorities, audience needs, and the future direction of the website.
Based on these findings, the experience needed to better communicate the client’s offerings, guide prospective customers toward an agent, and serve several distinct audiences without overwhelming them with irrelevant content.
Establishing design principles
To translate the audit findings into memorable decision-making tools, we created four design principles. These gave the client and project team a shared language for evaluating UX and visual-design options throughout the engagement.
Focus on care
The client helps medical professionals focus on patient care, so the website should make essential information easy to locate and understand.
Sorting hat
When the experience can identify a user’s needs or audience type, it should prioritize relevant information and reduce unnecessary noise.
Rolling hills, not cliffs
The experience should avoid sudden dead ends, overwhelming requirements, or large leaps in effort.
Flavor of the day
Medicine and professional liability risks continually evolve, so the website should show that the client understands current industry issues and provides timely, credible resources.
Prioritizing key experience areas
Not every page required the same level of design investment. Through the audit and stakeholder discussions, we identified four priority experience areas:
Discovery
Discovery workshop and stakeholder alignment
Discovery workshop
Following the audit, the lead CX strategist and I developed and facilitated a two-hour discovery workshop with 11 client employees employees from claims, analytics, risk management, business development, and other teams, alongside 8 people from my team. The client team represented a range of audiences across the customer journey, including prospects, policyholders, and agents.
Participants completed collaborative Miro activities on how well the existing website met audience needs, where prospective customers encountered gaps or friction, and what capabilities or content would make the website more useful. The workshop helped us prioritize content, identify page-template requirements, and determine which user journeys required the greatest attention.
Expanding the website’s role
The workshop also revealed that the client wanted the website to support goals beyond traditional insurance marketing, giving greater visibility to its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; philanthropic work; careers and employer-brand content; and risk-management and educational resources.
Because the client does not sell policies directly online, the primary conversion goal was not checkout. The experience instead needed to build confidence and connect qualified prospects with an agent who could develop a customized plan.
BEYOND INSURANCE MARKETING
DEI
Philanthropy
Careers
Risk-management resources
Structure
Information architecture and templates
Exploring the information architecture
One of the client’s primary requests was to reconsider how the website’s content was organized. Based on the audit, background research, and discovery workshop, we developed two high-level information architecture concepts:
Product-based structure (selected)
Organized information primarily around insurance products, services, and organizational content.
Audience-based structure
Organized information around the needs of groups such as prospective customers, policyholders, agents, and job seekers.
Choosing a direction
Presenting both concepts helped stakeholders decide whether the website’s primary focus should be its products or its audiences. They selected the product-based structure.
Organizing by product meant no visitor would be left unsure where to go if they did not fit neatly into an audience type. People hold many different titles, but they generally know which product they are looking for, and a product-based structure lets them browse or jump straight to a specific offering. Stakeholders also felt it would better support future growth by allowing the site to expand without being constrained by a fixed set of audience types.
Creating reusable templates
We identified eight templates that could support the complete range of website content.
I created responsive desktop and mobile wireframes across three design sprints. The templates incorporated existing content where possible and used placeholders when new content was still in development. After each sprint, I presented the wireframes to client stakeholders, documented feedback, and incorporated approved changes into the following iteration.
The template-based approach established consistency across the website and reduced the need for one-off page designs.
Sprint 1
Wireframe
Present
Apply feedback
Sprint 2
Wireframe
Present
Apply feedback
Sprint 3
Wireframe
Present
Apply feedback
Approved
Moves to UI design
Desktop wireframe samples
Homepage
Risk resources
Industry insights
Mobile wireframe samples.
Homepage
Risk resources
Industry insights
Testing
Prototype testing with three audiences
I created an interactive Figma prototype connecting the key wireframes and priority journeys. It was designed to test whether users could understand the revised navigation, locate relevant insurance and service information, and find an agent or begin the quote process.
I co-moderated the sessions with a CX strategist and documented participant behavior, questions, and usability issues.
By the numbers
88.75
System Usability Scale score
well above the commonly cited average of 68
Key findings
01
Insider language was confusing
Prospects and policyholders were confused by insider terms. We recommended avoiding industry acronyms and renaming internally focused section titles to plain-language labels.
02
Proof points mattered to prospects
Reasons to believe and key differentiators were critical for people considering the client's insurance offerings. We recommended adding more of them, such as detailed testimonials, statistics, and included services, while continuing to promote the company's longevity and financial strength ratings.
03
The experience was easy to use
Participants found the experience easy to use and understand, and noted it had the information and quoting process they expected. We recommended keeping pages simple and scannable, with expected content and processes readily available.
Synthesis and iteration
After the interviews, we analyzed observations across the three participant groups and created a findings deck for client stakeholders, prioritized by severity, frequency, and impact on the primary journeys.
I presented the findings and corresponding UX recommendations to the client. We then refined the information architecture, wireframes, navigation labels, and conversion pathways before moving into visual design.
Delivery
UI collaboration and delivery
Partnering on visual design
Once the wireframes were approved, I partnered closely with the lead UI designer, who created the final visual system. Before visual exploration began, I walked him through the intent behind each template, the key findings from user testing, and the interaction, content-priority, responsive, and accessibility requirements.
We held regular working sessions throughout the UI phase to identify potential issues and ensure the visual designs preserved the approved user flows and content hierarchy.
Testing findings carried into the final designs. On the homepage, navigation labels were simplified, “Find an agent” became a primary call to action, the featured services were condensed, and a new image-led section with grid cards gave more room for proof points.
Functional specifications
Because the client planned to hand the final designs to a third-party development team with limited ongoing access to the original project team, implementation documentation was especially important.
I partnered with a business analyst to create detailed functional specifications for each designed template and interaction. The documentation included:
Accessibility requirements
Hover, active, focus, and error states
Dropdown behavior
Animations and transitions
Interaction logic
Responsive breakpoints
Component behavior
Content and layout rules
We reviewed every designed page to ensure that the external development team had enough information to interpret the experience accurately without relying on frequent follow-up conversations.
After completing the specifications, we delivered the final designs, prototype, documentation, and supporting files to the client and its third-party development partner.
Outcome
Outcomes and reflection
Outcomes
The redesigned website launched reflecting the delivered designs.
Scored 88.75 on the System Usability Scale in testing with 15 participants across three audience groups.
Created a revised, product-based information architecture that clarified complex insurance, service, and organizational content.
Designed eight reusable responsive templates to support the full website and future growth.
Delivered detailed functional and accessibility specifications for implementation by an external development team.
Reflection
This project reinforced the importance of designing not only for end users, but also for the teams responsible for maintaining and implementing the experience.
Creating shared design principles, validating the experience with distinct user groups, and documenting detailed component behavior helped connect the initial strategy to a more implementable and sustainable solution.
