Client: Tokio Marine Asia
Date: 2020/2021
Client: Tokio Marine Asia
Date: 2020/2021
Over the past 130 years Tokio Marine have helped their customers navigate the frightening world of buying insurance. Their customer-centric approach creates approachable tailored insurance products that suit the every day lives of their customers. Tokio Marine Asia turned to my team to help them bring these values and objectives into their digital space across 4 countries.
Valtech worked with TMA’s internal stakeholders to help them revitalise their online presence and create a digital experience that suited the varying requirements needed by their 8 business units across Asia. The goal was to deliver an approachable experience that users could easily navigate and find out what insurance products are best suited to their needs. The team was tasked to create the content strategy, information architecture, UX and visual design for a responsive website containing multiple tools and user journeys to help their customers be more self serving.
The project had lots of challenges, not least of all the multi-regional aspect for 4 countries which are each split into 2 business units that further divide again. This was also Tokio Marine's second attempt at digital transformation after a trying 5 years ago.
When I joined, the project was well underway and had moved to the visual design phase. Competitor benchmarking had been done, the sitemaps were defined and wireframes for key user journeys had been presented to the client for feedback. The visual design language had been created and reviewed via a basic moodboard and the team were about to deliver the first of 3 batches of final screen designs on Desktop(DT) and Mobile(MB).
The team had received a lot of feedback about the wireframes and visual design language and had tried to incorporate everything into the screen designs. New to the project in my first week, I did what I could to help by designing some of the standard features such as search.
When the screens were delivered - underlying problems surfaced.
The team had done a good job but they had taken the feedback from all of the clients stakeholders literally. The UX was too similar to the clients old site with little innovation and the design language was now nothing like what the client were looking for. With the tight timeline and not fully aligned site architecture, this was a disaster(...and I don’t use that word lightly). The team had done the best they could under the circumstances, listening to their clients and their needs but I believe there were many miss-aligned voices from the client's side which made it practically impossible for the team to please everybody.
The client escalated the issues to senior management because they recognised this as a major risk to the project and had lost confidence in our ability to deliver.
Our team needed a leader who could facilitate alignment with the client and their stakeholders and someone to organise the UX deliveries. So I realigned my priorities and fully took over the project.
I set to work re-aligning the project with the objective of making the clients happy, not burning the team out (who were working 12 hour days previously) and trying to spend as little budget as possible(it had already run out).
Because the designs were at the high fidelity stage and the complex user journey wireframes had been done, I decided that we would continue to deliver high designs even though this would probably affect the internal budget. The timeline was more important from a project perspective and going back to wireframes would have cost us. Therefore I took the project back to the moodboard stage so we could get the design language agreed and signed off by all parties before moving forward. This also gave us a chance to start getting incremental sign off from the client so the project was more secure going forward. To do this we held a short workshop with the clients key stakeholders to assess the design against the original moodboard that was “agreed” before. We reviewed the moodboard, updated and agreed on the style before designing 5 key screens on DT and MB so the client could explain to their stakeholders how the site would look and get agreement. We got it signed off in writing and had a secure foundation to build from.
After holding a prioritisation workshop I then divided the project's 3 design phases into 9 short sprints so we could get incremental sign off of small parts. This was important because it took the clients secondary stakeholders 10 working days to review each phase. To manage the time we worked on other sprints with our primary stakeholders in tandem.
After such a challenging period it was important to make sure the client was confident in our ability to deliver and mend a fractured trust. Working with our Projcet Director I held daily calls with the client to not only show our commitment and to gather requirements, but also to protect my team from the difficult conversions that were happening. After a while we established a positive relationship and won back their trust in our design expertise.
I want to add that the expectations placed upon the team were vast and they did an excellent job before and after I arrived on the projects.
With the design language signed off and part of sprint 1 aligned, we moved to finalise sprint 1 before moving to the create a foundation to build on. Each sprint was given between 8-10 days for design, feedback and amends. Where we ran into problems with the huge amount of stakeholders not being able to agree I resorted to dot voting to reach a consensus so we could move on. We also ran working with clients project teams in tandem to waiting for feedback from the wider stakeholder groups. This took time and increased work, but it was the only way to continue with the project and not risk the timeline.
With the new system in place and scope aligned we continued with the sprints quickly, efficiently and with the quality our clients expected. We delivered a site that split into 4 countries, each with 2 completely different business models and user journeys. We created bespoke insurance and financial planning tools for them with clickable prototypes to prove the concepts (No budget for user testing though which is unfortunate). We provided a pattern library, style guide and UX writing for customisable insurance claims forms with over 100 potential fields and permutations. We delivered around 250 screens for both desktop and mobile.
The client was happy with the designs and the project was back on track. We held daily calls with the developers to hand over the designs and help them through understanding the user journeys and use cases.
A common opinion is it’s always a challenge joining a project that is not going well. Sure, it’s hard to be onboarded and get up to speed, but one thing you can take advantage of is that you are a fresh face to everyone. You can talk about the failings and swoop in to save the day with the benefit of hindsight. This is a wonderful thing which I used to get the client onside and move forward. The project ended up a success from a design point of view, however there is one thing I should have done better which was to align with the development team more often.
Because of the vague scope it was hard to say no to the client when they wanted a feature, a change or anything extra within reason. To minimise the impact on the development scope I should have added time during the design sprints to work with the developers to see if they could help us refine our designs to be more efficient to deliver.
The sites go live at the end of 2021. I have been working with the development team over the past year to fill in any gaps and refine some components to make the UI more scalable and consistent across the site.
With this website, the digital landscape for Tokio Marine will be completely transformed giving their customers more access to self managed services like renewal, purchasing products and life planning.
I would say this project has been my biggest challenge of my career to date. The multiple regions, dynamic tools and status of the project when I inherited it took my design and management skills to the limit and pushed me to think more creatively and more from a business perspective - both the clients and the agency.
However the key takeaway is a simple one - Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail. If the scope had been defined more clearly and therefore with the right resources allocated, the project would not have taken such a turn.
I’ll never forget this quote from one of our senior team members regarding future business proposals after working with him on this project.
“If we win the deal, we will win it in a good condition.”
