OTIP
Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan
Duration: 4 weeks
Role: UX Researcher and UI Designer
Tools: Adobe, Google Docs, Survey Monkey platform
Photo by Max Fischer from Pexels
Problem
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Member problem: A high proportion of eligible group members aren't benefiting from being insured with OTIP.
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Business problem: OTIP has a significant penetration gap, with only 15% of eligible members owning an OTIP home or auto insurance policy. OTIP has aggressive growth targets to double the volume of policies in force by 2025 so this gap needs to be resolved.
Goal
In this project we had two objectives:
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A better understanding of the audience of the Ontario education community so that OTIP can increase their reach and relevance.
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Determining whether the member segmentation profiles that were completed in 2016 remain valid today or create new ones for the current times.
The Process
Through brainstorming, we planned the project scope. We agreed to follow the process coming below:
A. Who is OTIP?
OTIP (Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan) has 7 different areas of concentration (websites) that all revolve around Ontario’s education community. To become a member you have to belong to a teachers union within the education system.
Client Intervew
We interviewed one of the OTIP's employees. Based on our chats, our group determined some assumptions that the business was making about its members that could potentially be wrong and might be leading to some misused energy and advertising funds.
These assumptions from the client side were:
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Everyone that is insured by them is a teacher.
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Almost everyone owns a car or a home.
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That everyone knows about OTIP social media or gets their newsletters.
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People use OTIP for value.
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That the mobile application works properly.
B. User Study
Our Focused was on the member problem of the case study which is coming below:
"A high proportion of eligible group members aren't benefiting from being insured with OTIP."
We used a qualitative research method and interviewed real users to ensure our gathered information are representative.
Survey
To validate the OTIP's UX-related products we needed to understand its users in-depth. So we conducted a user study by sending out surveys to working professionals who are employed with the Ontario Teachers Association and various school boards throughout the province.
Question: I am a ...
Result: Everyone covered by OTIP is a teacher.
We wanted to show the different areas of careers that you can have within the Ontario School Board.
Question: Which of the following occupations qualify for OTIP? Choose all that apply.
Result: 90% of interviewees believe that to qualify for OTIP you should be a Full-time teacher.
Question: What other criteria must be met to qualify for OTIP?
Result: Everyone that qualifies for OTIP is a teacher.
Question: Choose which of the following best applies to you - (Home insurance)
Result: More than 60% of participants own a home.
Question: Choose which of the following best applies to you - (Auto insurance)
Result: Almost 90% of participants own a car.
Question: Which of the following ways have you referred to OTIP? Choose all that apply.
We wanted to show OTIP where their focus should be and where their members are coming from.
Result: Everyone knows about OTIP’s social media and newsletters.
Question: Which benefits influenced your decision to choose OTIP as your insurance provider? Choose all that apply.
Result: A large percentage of their members are signed up with OTIP because their employer or union board member told them it was required in their contract and not a choice.
Question: Which of the following areas do you think OTIP needs the most improvement?
Result: 33% of members think the rates are not satisfying, 22% find the coverage checking difficult, and believe the value is not reached immediately.
Question: When one of your insurance plans needs to be renewed I will …
Result: Only 44% of members will continue their membership with OTIP.
Key takeaways:
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OTIP's members believe to qualify for OTIP coverage you have to be a teacher. This is a reason for individuals to skip OTIP from their coverage options.
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Advertising funds can be redirected to other areas of specialization to acquire more members.
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One of the reasons that individuals do not apply for OTIP insurance is that they don’t know they qualify for OTIP. However, you don’t have to be a teacher to qualify.
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Not OTIP's members own a home. Potentially a third of their advertising funds are being directed to people that don’t fit the persona.
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Not every one of OTIP's members owns a car. Potentially 11% of their advertising funds are being directed to people that don’t fit the persona.
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None of the participants believed the OTIP's sign-up process is easy.
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An assumption that OTIP stated in the client interview was that people use OTIP for the value. This survey indicated that this assumption was incorrect and OTIP could benefit from improving in that area of their business to retain and gain more members. And 56% of users will not be using OTIP in the future.
We analyzed OTIP’s personas for relevance, look for assumptions, find things which are unclear or confusing. Personas were compared against the problem statement that was provided below, looking for inconsistencies:
"We have a significant penetration gap, with only 15% of eligible members owning an OTIP home or auto insurance policy. OTIP has aggressive growth targets to double the volume of policies in force by 2025 so this gap needs to be resolved."
A. Snapshot
Here is a snapshot of the current personas that were being used by OTIP. They had a few of discrepancies that our team pointed out including:
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Stereotyping Naming
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Wrong Information
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Photos used as icons that didn’t make sense
B. Age Gapping
The current OTIP personas have the age groups separated into the wrong social groups.
C. Same Profile
When we started to analyze the senior and retired profile, we realized that they were the same profile, almost to the exact.
D. Same Information
In one of the survey questions, we ask who qualifies to be a member of OTIP. 100% of the people we asked stated they had to be a teacher. Everyone that is a part of the union qualifies including, custodial workers, administrative staff, and substitute teachers just to name a few. But their personas are only targeted to teachers.
Our Proposed Personas
These new personas were based on our surveys and user interviews with individuals working or who have retired from the Ontario School Board.
The goals for our new personas were as follows:
● Create concise personas
● Create behavioural archetypes
● Remove stigmatized language
● Represent all users
● Eliminate redundancies
● Ensure personas are relevant to the current problem statement
Below are 4 new personas that would replace the current ones in place within OTIP.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Photo by Pixabay
Photo by Kampus Production
How Might We’s
Through several meetings and brainstorming the team considered the following points:
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Discover where the pain points are.
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Convert existing customers with half coverage (health & dental) into full coverage memberships (home & auto).
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Have a specific marketing program for specific demographics.
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Make the websites more user-friendly or combine them all together.
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Make the mobile application more user-friendly.
A. OTIP User Journey
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For new members using the main website, there is no sign-up option to click on. This makes that impossible for them to sign-up and starts their insurance easily.
Here is a more user-friendly experience that we created in our user journey to showcase the flow that a new member should have in order to have higher member retention rates.
B. OTIP Ecosystem
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We have an assumption that one of the issues with retention rate and member satisfaction is the design of the OTIP's platforms.
We created this new and improved ecosystem for OTIP that would be more user-friendly and would keep members happy and retain customer satisfaction rather than frustration.
C. OTIP Website
After reviewing the website and digging into other underlining issues that may not have been known to OTIP, we came up with a hypothesis that may be the underlining cause of OTIP’s penetration gap and lack of member retention:
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They have 7 different websites and 1 website in french.
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There have been login issues through the mobile app for one year that have not been addressed.
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One of the issues with retention rate and member satisfaction is the design of the website.
Usability Heuristics (Jakob's 10 principles)
All 10 principles are met on the OTIP website except #1 & #4 which are coming below:
#1: Visibility of system status
The status of the web pages relies on the breadcrumbs, otherwise, users won't be able to recognize which pages they are in.
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Having a hyperlink indicator for the selected menu will solve this issue.
#4: Consistency and standards
There is a lack of consistency in the main menu of the website and breadcrumbs; including eliminated "products" in the breadcrumbs of some pages.
.com
Like all official Canadian websites which have internal services OTIP is expected to have a local domain with .ca, however, OTIP uses .com on its main website. This creates a kind of confusion for users and they are not sure if this website is from Canada or not.
Sign-up
In the user journey which starts from website since there is no sign-up option to click on, it is impossible for a new member to sign-up and start his insurance easily.
Logging In
When the user wants to login into the main website, there are five titles for login, so they have to spend a few seconds to find out which part they want to log in through. We believe that this is not user-friendly and there should be one general login option for all users.
D. Branding
Visual Consistency
Golf OTIP ( http://golf.otip.com/) is almost free of OTIP and except for one small white logo, there are no branding elements on the website. Colours, layout and theme could be changed to OTIP’s format.
The user interfaces in Arm OTIP (“http://arm.otip.com/”) could have more visual features from OTIP and it could dedicate more space for OTIP visual elements.
The visual design and user interface on the “Edvantage” website do not match OTIP’s visual branding such as layouts, fonts, pictures and colours.
Edvantage appears to be a completely different product and is assumed by customers to be irrelevant to OTIP.
In order to have visual consistency, all logos should be the same on various platforms. OTIP insurance website’s logo on the title bar needs to be the same as the “otip.com” page’s logo. The first one has a white square but the second one is transparent. Also, OTIP’s logo on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is in a circle and on Linkedin & the main website’s head title is square.
Social Media
It seems that OTIP is not very active in interacting with users on social media.
Quick Example:
A youtube post that is 1 year old where a user commented that help is required, however, OTIP has no responsibility for it yet.
After doing some research concerning OTIP’s app, we found some major issues.
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The reviews for the mobile app were 1 star.
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18 Reviews and every single one of them states login issues.
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This dates back to over a year ago and it is still not fixed.
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This could be deferring people to sign up with OTIP for further insurance.
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Trufla Technology is responsible for this app. They have many clients and use the exact same template for other apps as well.
Current OTIP Mobile App
The app looks old and has a very basic design.
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The colour combination is not attractive.
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Alignment is not proper.
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The font used is inconsistent
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In-App store/Play store around more than 10 companies use the same template built by Trufla Technology.
App Rating and Reviews
The app should be user-friendly and bug-free so that customers can use it.
If people find it hard to use the app that will affect the business and OTIP will lose customers.
Trufla Technology
We looked into Trufla Technology to what this company was all about.
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Location: Calgary, Canada (headquarters), Cairo, Egypt
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Team: 60 specialists (developers, digital marketing specialists)
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Built via brokers and engineered by the top talent in the tech sphere.
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Digital options for the modern insurance brokerage.
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Help brokers and agencies leverage the power of digital in order to solve some of their biggest problems.
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Products include lead management tools, custom raters, mobile apps, digital scorecards, and more.
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Open insurance platform
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OTIP App is made by using Trulfa technology product truMobile.
truMobile
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An online web portal and mobile app with the brokerage’s brand.
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A digital solution for customers.
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Can supply a digital solution to the customer that reduces the workload of the brokers.
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The interface allows clients to take care of their insurance plan whenever they want, at any place they choose from their phone, tablet or desktop.
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From viewing policy documents to printing pink cards to submitting claims and change requests, your clients can do it all.
Similar Apps From Trufla Technology for other Insurance Companies:
New and Improved Mobile App
We designed a new interface mockup for OTIP that was more visually appealing and user-friendly.
Challenges
OTIP confidential information was a major obstacle for us and narrowed our findings mainly to observations and surveys.
Lessons Learned
For future projects we will consider the following points:
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Using quantitative data extracted from users' logs of the Websites and Apps to have a broader understanding of the pain points.
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Validating our findings with quantitative data.
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Investing time in UX audits such as navigation of the website
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Conducting usability test