The way we design digital forms often mimic the way printed forms were designed back in the days. Unfortunately, many of these printed forms are still being heavily used today, especially in complex environments such as healthcare, insurances, B2B, institutions, political bodies and many others. In light of pandemic, many of these companies and organizations have been finally moving to digital, replacing their printed artefacts with digital counterparts.
You are working with multi-national insurance companies, investment companies, banking services, healthcare companies and legal firms. More specifically, you are creating digital journeys out of outdated printed forms and PDFs. Your current client is a large global insurance company that only recently launched a project to transition to digital. In their case, a common way of filling in a form requires users to print out a PDF, fill it in manually, sign it, and send it by post or hand it over to office desks in person.
Usually this process is very slow and expensive, with a lot of back and forth and waiting involved. Plus, users often forget to submit important information, some of the input contains mistakes that needs to be corrected first, and processing time has been growing over the years.
Unfortunately, the insurance domain is quite complex, so each PDF often contains 15–20 pages. And usually customers have to complete 5–6 PDFs for complex inquiries. Your client is struggling to make it work — luckily they have you to help them!
There is a wide variety of users that need to be supported. Ideally, your client would love their customers to be able to fill in forms on their own, but in reality end-users often hire professionals and advisors to do it for them. Because the insurance company has a diverse offering for various social groups, and it operates worldwide, the users vary significantly in terms of age, gender, income and pretty much anything else — this also includes location and language.
However, a vast majority of customers come from Western countries, predominantly USA and Canada, although there is a large user base in Germany, UK and France as well.
Much of the traffic to the website comes from search engines, but especially in the health insurance business, price comparison websites play a major role. There are dozens of campaigns running at any given time, with incentives ranging from discounts to free months of insurance. Consequently, the bounce rates on your client’s sites are quite high, with people jumping from one insurance service to the other.
For the digital journeys that are already created, users often abandon at the very first step when they noticed that 22 steps are required to complete a form, or when they see the price quote for an insurance. In terms of change requests or final application submissions, most of the PDF forms haven’t been converted to digital forms yet. The ones that already exist are indeed used, but are poorly designed with a lot of issues blocking users from submitting accurate data.
Mobile users make up for just around 18% of overall traffic, but abandonment rates for forms on mobile are very high. Most users are very hesitant to even start filling in a form because it’s usually very long and very complex, and doesn’t look great on mobile.