Designing For a High Growth Startup
Lawrence Ntim, Senior Product Designer & Kelly La Fleur, Product Designer
At Ethos, the design team is tasked with creating experiences that make life insurance simple, accessible, and affordable for everyone. Traditionally, life insurance has been a long, arduous process involving medical exams and weeks of underwriting. Ethos is changing this with a simplified underwriting process using predictive modeling to provide instant decisions — transforming the life insurance experience into a short and painless one. The design team is an integral component in creating the easy and user-friendly experience that allows us to help protect the next million families.
As a design team, we have several priorities: helping users feel comfortable and safe as they navigate our product, maintaining a high velocity of experimentation, and producing new features and functionality. Design is approached in a process-oriented, rigorous manner. Some tenants of our process are:
Solving The Right Problems
Our method for product development and design at Ethos mirrors the scientific method. That is, we focus heavily on both defining the problem as well as creating hypotheses about solutions that we are able to test and validate.
Below, we dive into this methodology a bit deeper:
- Developing hypotheses
A good hypothesis can be drawn from many different sources, but the most common way we form ours is through systematic observations of users and how they interact with our product. Using data from analytics, foundational studies from our research team, and tools like FullStory — we’re able to not only clearly define the issues users are facing, but also generate data-driven hypotheses focused on these real user problems.
- Research and hypothesis testing
Improving Ethos’ user experience and driving product development forward begins with data and foundational insights from our research team. Research findings provide perspective on our users’ attitudes, experiences, and behavior regarding life insurance as well as their path to Ethos. We can apply these findings both from the foundational research (e.g., when overhauling a user experience) and iterative research (e.g., making incremental changes to the screens the user interacts with) in order to create experiences that center around the needs of the user when they go through the process of getting covered.
Following the application of research findings to some early iterations, we’ll decide which method of testing will give us the most valuable feedback on our designs. We often use moderated or unmoderated user-testing methods when there are several versions of a prototype that we want to get deep qualitative insights on. If we are making smaller, iterative changes to the product, we’ll experiment with a few hypothesis-driven variations and perform A/B testing. This helps us quickly evaluate our hypothesis and move into iterative design.
Iterative Design & Experimentation
Agile environments, such as high-growth startups like ours, are built for speed and velocity. For designers, it can be challenging to consider all the tenets of user-centered design when delivering at the pace necessary to move forward with product development. It is a constant balancing act between speed and quality of designs.
One way we address this challenge is by starting with the simplest design capable of proving or disproving our hypothesis. Once we have the minimum-viable-product or MVP, we iterate based on the results from AB testing or user-testing. A good example of iterative design at Ethos is the evolution of the Ethos Policy Estimator Tool.
The Ethos estimate tool gives users a life insurance quote, including both policy parameters and price, after some core information is collected (e.g., demographics, basic health information). This estimate tool has a few interactive buttons and inputs, such as form fields, a call-to-action (e.g. “Get your Estimate”) and other helpful pieces of information. Prior research and experiments have shown that users often rely on this tool to help them understand life insurance concepts as they complete the quoting process, so it is critical we make the effort to improve the experience.
Since its implementation over two years ago, we’ve hypothesized and tested various user-centered changes to the estimate tool, leading to the current, most- optimized version . These evidence-based changes included placement, different layouts, information hierarchy, alternative input fields, adjustments to the interactive components, different copy, and various call-to-action buttons. At a more granular level, we take a look at each individual component in search of areas of opportunity.
One example of this granular component exploration is the iterative process we’ve gone through with form field inputs.The design of a form can include varying styles of field inputs (e.g., text field, drop-downs, toggle, sliders). Finding the right input style for a question can facilitate an efficient user experience and improve conversion rates. Through rapid experimentation of alternative form styles, we’ve championed the form fields that performed best in A/B testing.
One of the form fields we’ve championed is the “What’s your birthdate?” question. This field asks for a user’s birthdate, providing a text input field in a MM/DD/YYYY format with keyboard entry of eight characters. During one experiment, we hypothesized that requiring less physical input from a user would increase the percentage of users completing the field. We tested several designs of alternative fields to ask for a birthdate, experimented with A/B testing, analyzed the results, and when a clear winner resulted (through less drop-off at this point in the process), we implemented it across all products permanently. We disregarded the remaining designs and moved on to the next iteration.
Bringing It All Together
Now that we’ve explained the process of experimentation and iteration, how do we bring this process together to get a design in front of users? Each project is a collaborative effort here at Ethos between Design, Research, Engineering, and Analytics, with each team being involved in every experiment. In an agile environment, it can seem difficult to manage all those stakeholders while maintaining velocity and an ambitious experiment timeline, so we have a few guiding thoughts that keep our teams on track and on pace.
- Preparation is paramount
If you stay ready, you never have to get ready. This is a good way to sum up our planning for experiments. For each experiment, we usually have assigned personnel planned out: designers, engineers, analytics & product managers chosen based on product area and expertise. We also focus on team organization and delineation of responsibilities to give our teammates accountability over their own work. It also allows the team to focus less on acquiring resources and more on the work itself.
- Constraints are opportunities
Another point that helps with our efficiency is treating constraints as opportunities. Very often, our teams get stuck with constraints that limit our initial visions of the product. These constraints can take several forms, including design limitations, codebase limitations, insurance limitations. When challenges arise, we change the narrative to see how we can stretch our creativity to solve the problem. That creativity can take different forms, such as creativity in design where we rethink how an experience should be (based on user input); or creativity in experimentation, such as reconfiguring how we present the experiment to users in our flow. These ways, and many more, is how our teams tackle the constraints that come up regularly in product development and treat them as opportunities instead.
- We are all product owners
At Ethos, we believe great ideas come from everywhere, and we encourage cross-team collaboration. For example, it’s very common for engineers to recommend a new solution to how we are designing something, or our analytics teammates to come up with different variations of how to test a hypothesis. This collaboration works well because there are shared feelings of product ownership across the team, and we all strive to see our experiments and product launches through to the end. With this team mindset, we strive to create the best solution. If it turns out the best solution isn’t the one to be launched immediately, we keep the conversations and files in our back pockets for when the right time arises.
This experimentation and iteration process is by no means perfect, and there are often hiccups along the way. However, the drive to consistently improve how we work and create more impactful experiences for our customers is what drives our design team forward.
If you resonate with any of this, feel free to check out our careers page. We’d love to hear from you!
Kelly La Fleur joined Ethos in July 2021 as a Product Designer on the Consumer Growth team. She enjoys traveling the world, eating good food, and hanging out with her dog, Benny. Ask her why Thursdays are the best day of the week. Interested in joining Kelly’s team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.
Lawrence joined Ethos in November of 2021 as a Senior designer on the Consumer Team. He enjoys great movies, the Los Angeles Lakers and ATVing. Interested in joining Lawrence’s team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.
