Reimagining how a new generation discovers, understands, and purchases life insurance — through conversational design, modern brand identity, and radical simplicity.
Client
Lifely
My Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Domain
InsurTech · Consumer Digital
Year
2020
Tools
Figma · Hotjar · Miro · InVision
Overview
Life insurance has a reputation problem. It's associated with complexity, jargon, and uncomfortable conversations about mortality — none of which resonate with younger audiences who are precisely the customers the industry needs to reach. Lifely, a term life insurance startup, wanted to break that pattern.
The brief was both a design challenge and a brand challenge: create a digital experience that would make a 28-year-old feel like buying life insurance was a smart, modern, even aspirational financial decision — rather than something their parents nagged them about. The existing website read like a traditional insurance portal. It needed to feel like a trusted friend who happened to know a lot about financial planning.
Working through Cognizant's client engagement model, I led UX research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design for the full website redesign.
The Challenge
Lifely faced a compounded acquisition problem: not only did they need to attract Gen Z customers, they needed to hold their attention long enough to educate them on a product category most had never engaged with — and then convert them before they bounced.
Limited market visibility — Lifely was a new entrant in a category dominated by incumbent brands with decades of brand equity. The website was their primary acquisition channel, and it wasn't differentiating them from anyone.
High abandonment on quote flows — Analytics showed that the vast majority of visitors who initiated a quote request abandoned the process partway through. The quote flow was long, form-heavy, and felt like filling out a tax return rather than a conversation.
Brand-audience mismatch — The existing visual design was corporate and conservative — appropriate for a 1950s insurance company, not a startup targeting 25–35-year-olds who comparison-shop on mobile devices while listening to podcasts.
Education gap — Young prospects didn't understand the product. Without baseline education on what term life insurance is, why it matters, and how little it costs, even a beautiful design would fail to convert.
Research
Before designing anything, I needed to understand the target audience's actual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors around financial protection — not the assumptions the business had built the original product around.
16 in-depth interviews with 24–35-year-olds — exploring their financial decision-making, insurance awareness, digital purchase behaviors, and emotional associations with life insurance.
Heatmap and session recording analysis via Hotjar — identifying precise drop-off points in the quote flow and understanding which content areas attracted the most engagement.
UX audit of 8 direct and adjacent competitors (including disruptors like Lemonade and Bestow) — identifying patterns that resonated with younger audiences and areas of differentiation opportunity.
Mapped users' existing mental models around financial decision-making to understand how life insurance could be framed within frameworks they already trusted.
65% of Lifely's traffic was mobile — conducted specific research on mobile purchase behavior in financial categories to inform interaction and form design.
Visual preference testing across brand directions, tone-of-voice studies, and social media content analysis to calibrate what "trustworthy but approachable" looked like for this audience.
Emotional Insight
The primary emotional barrier wasn't fear of death — it was feeling under-qualified to make the decision. Young prospects felt they didn't know enough to choose correctly, so they deferred. The design needed to make them feel guided and capable, not overwhelmed.
Interaction Insight
Users who experienced the quote flow as a conversation (one question at a time, with clear explanations) converted at significantly higher rates than those exposed to traditional multi-field forms. This validated the Conversational UI hypothesis before we built anything.
Trust Insight
Social proof in financial contexts needed to be specific and credible — not star ratings, but real customer stories with named circumstances ("Sarah, 29, new mom") that helped prospects see themselves in the product.
Mobile Insight
Mobile form abandonment was 3× higher when input fields required more than 3 consecutive taps. Designing for thumb-first interactions — large touch targets, progressive disclosure, minimal mandatory fields — was essential for the mobile majority.
Design Process
The design strategy had two parallel tracks: a brand and visual redesign that would attract and hold a younger audience, and a fundamental reimagining of the quote flow using Conversational UI principles to remove the intimidation from the purchase journey.
Restructured site architecture around user questions ("Do I need this?", "How much does it cost?", "Is this real?") rather than product features.
Four rounds of wireframe iteration — each tested with 5 target users before moving forward. Particular focus on the Conversational UI quote flow.
Developed a fresh visual identity — warm, modern, human — that used photography, illustration, and typography to make life insurance feel approachable.
Full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance check — color contrast, focus management, screen reader compatibility — ensuring the site worked for all users.
Signature Design Decision
The most impactful design decision was replacing the traditional multi-field quote form with a Conversational UI pattern — one question at a time, presented as a natural dialogue, with helpful context for each question.
One question per screen — Eliminated the form anxiety of seeing 15 fields simultaneously. Each question was presented cleanly with a simple, clear answer mechanism — reducing cognitive load at each step.
Contextual micro-education — Each question included a small "Why we ask" explainer that addressed the most common hesitations at that specific moment — converting uncertainty into confidence rather than abandonment.
Progressive commitment — Early questions were easy and non-sensitive (age, gender, health basics), building momentum and investment before asking for contact information — a proven conversion optimization technique from behavioral economics.
Impact
↑ 47%
Increase in quote flow completion rate — the Conversational UI dramatically reduced abandonment versus the previous form design
↑ 38%
Improvement in mobile session duration and engagement depth — users explored more of the site before making a purchase decision
↑ 31%
Increase in overall conversion rate from website visitor to completed application within the first 60 days post-launch
Key Learnings
Conversational UI is about empathy, not novelty. The reason it worked wasn't because it was a new interaction pattern — it was because it acknowledged that users were anxious and uncertain, and responded to that emotional state with patience and context rather than demanding information upfront.
For complex products, education is a conversion mechanism. The "Why we ask" explainers were initially pushed back on as adding length. They turned out to be one of the highest-engagement elements on the page — users who read them converted at 2× the rate of those who didn't.
Brand design has measurable business impact. The visual redesign wasn't purely aesthetic — the post-launch brand perception survey showed a significant shift in "trustworthy" and "modern" scores, which directly correlated with improved conversion metrics.