Solution Design

SITUATION

Auto insurance companies face a fiercely competitive market. Today’s consumers demand an improved user experience for selecting coverage, buying insurance, and filing claims. For companies such as Progressive Insurance, mobile apps give consumers more choices and insurers the opportunity to gain market share.

Progressive Insurance executives had several ideas for injecting new energy and adding more value to its mobile portfolio. But the company needed to determine which of these innovative ideas would best fit the company’s requirements and its technical infrastructure.

Because of our deep experience in mobile technology, the Progressive team hired Digital Foundry to participate in a series of working sessions to guide the definition of and refine these concepts and quickly create a functional design brief that would guide further development.

SOLUTION

When ideas for new features are plentiful, but deployment schedules are tight, it’s essential to prioritize various concepts based on feasibility, functionality, and the constraints of existing and new technologies.

Digital Foundry recommended hosting a comprehensive workshop to explore these issues. Our consulting team collaborated with Progressive’s mobile team to generate and refine ideas utilizing Digital Foundry’s three-tiered digital solution creation approach. Additionally Digital Foundry consultants worked to clarify the technical implications of different features, and determine which could be quickly developed into prototypes for further evaluation.

In less than a week, we delivered a functional design brief that became the framework for creating a wide variety of mobile prototypes by mapping user scenarios and rough wireframes to the time, cost, and effort required to implement those designs.

RESULTS

By recommending a quick and efficient way to leverage Progressive’s knowledge of its market and our expertise and defining requirements, we helped our client:

• Understand and manage the constraints of current technologies and how the existing technical infrastructure could support meeting functional requirements.
• Gain valuable insights into which specific features were most feasible – weighing development time, cost, and effort required for implementation against benefits.
• Fully document features and requirements in the form of functional design brief that served as a jumping off point for developing prototypes on an aggressive timeline.