GEICO
Usability Tests - User Interviews - Functional Prototypes - Stakeholder Presentations - Developer Handoffs
My time as a full-time designer at a leading US home and auto insurer.
Responsibilities
UX Researcher: Usability Testing, User Interviews, Competitive Research Research Presentations
UX Designer: Journey Mapping, Prototyping, Component Design, Library Design, Proposal Presentations
More Details
June 2023 to October 2023
Tools: Figma, UserTesting, Axure RP, Quantum Metric
Background
While finishing my Master's Degree, I was employed as an associate UX designer at GEICO, serving as a UX researcher and designer. The majority of my work was centered around DriveEasy, a telematics initiative I helped iterate in preparation for our customer launch to 1.27 million users.
My time on the telematics team at GEICO was primarily spent building out the settings section of the application. I was responsible for taking rough wireframes and transforming them into development-ready mockups. This included constant communication with product managers and the development team to ensure that my designs met the needs of every stakeholder. The result was a fully functional prototype of the settings and comprehensive documentation of each component and frame used throughout.
My team's primary goal for the product at customer launch was to create a singular mobile experience where customers could both access their auto insurance information as well as view and manage the details of their DriveEasy policy. We aimed to provide customers with information about their driving habits, educate them on how to improve their safety, and display their driving history. These efforts specifically focused on improving the content of our messaging, making navigation around the application more intuitive, and promoting safer driving habits.
As the lead designer for the settings section of the DriveEasy redesign, I was tasked with taking previous iterations of the iOS and Android pages and implementing changes to address any concerns identified in user research. The primary problems I tackled revolved around how we communicated with the user, whether it was our iconography, word choice, or information architecture.
After finalizing my designs with input from other designers, product managers, and the mobile development team, I thoroughly documented each component, page, and feature within a mobile design library my team put together to make future iteration as simple as possible. The result was 10 revamped screens and 97 new component variants.
My main takeaways from working on DriveEasy revolve around designing in a corporate setting. Learning the art of using prefabricated components to address unique problems was new to me. I had to distinguish instances when it was valid to create a new asset with the design systems team to solve my exact issue from times when I should've instead found a suitable asset I could tailor to my specific needs.
This experience was also my first foray into having the autonomy to schedule meetings with stakeholders as necessary. Initially daunting, I learned to seek out information from area experts instead of relying on my assumptions or basic research. I was surrounded by smart and talented individuals, and I grew to understand that they could act as a resource for my development.
Finally, I grew confident in my ability to contribute to design processes. While prototyping, I ran into a roadblock where I couldn't find a way to make my interactions high-fidelity enough. To the best of my knowledge, Figma did not offer the capability to have saved states. When my team was unable to offer a solution, I took the time to learn how Figma variables work and how they could be applied to my designs. I shared my findings with team members, and we were all able to make a more interactive and life-like prototype for stakeholders to walk through.
