How can a non-profit website in the insurance/financial space offer credible and trustworthy information to its audiences?

The Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to be “the trusted source of unique, data-driven insights on insurance to inform and empower consumers.”

My role

As creative director, my role was to

Review work, make suggestions, and approve wireframes and final designs
Ensure work follows brand guidelines
Collaborate closely with two third-party teams: a design agency (4 people) and group of developers (3 people), who had to work with the organization's limited budget

Goals

Make sure the web experience is intuitive, highlighting the most sought-after information front and center.

Increase brand awareness
Decrease high drop-off rate
Help users quickly find information

Process highlights

Focusing on how people interact with insurance content and the reasons for their interests, we worked on an appropriate site structure based on types of information they were looking for.

Content analysis

How do people interact with the Triple-I’s content?

The Triple-I website struggles with a high drop-off rate – most consumers don’t find insurance to be an interesting topic; once somebody finds the bit of information they need, they leave. The site’s most read articles were under five minutes.

The solution needed to work across a wide variety of use cases for five main audiences

Consumers
Industry professionals
Media/press
Government and industry-related non-profit organizations
Academia

We mapped which proto-personas needed which kinds of content and how long they would spend engaging with the content. We decided to focus on consumers and media/press because they make up more than half of the user base.

Collaborating with the design agency, we established the initial sitemap to guide users through the types of information available.

We also analyzed the articles themselves within each category, discovering that one of the following actions were needed to improve them: they could be condensed; rewritten to sound more relevant to lifestyle; combined to make for a more convenient read instead of forcing the reader to jump to another article; or archived. We hired a writer to help us accomplish the information overhaul.

Usability testing

Interviews were not included in the initial process. After learning this, I emphasized the significance of interviews and usability testing to the chief marketing officer. She agreed and we received additional budget to implement

An online survey to gain insights on the old website
Usability testing: we spoke with 25 people (five persons per persona)

When we had our first set of wireframes ready, the design agency set up a simple clickable prototype. We did the first round of usability testing. We gained rich insights as to how the website could be improved or what it needed to address.

There's so much amazing content, but why am I not seeing what I need?

Why have I never heard of this organization?

The design agency fixed some usability problems and we did a second round of testing. Recognition of the organization’s name and whether or not it was a reliable source was the biggest concern expressed by the audience.

Solutions

We came up with some ways to highlight who the organization is and how our information was useful and empowering for consumers to make smart financial decisions.

Homepage

Placing the Triple-I's mission at the top of the homepage so that users could see up front who we are
Organizing articles into a grid structure to bring trending content to the surface, giving the feel of a timely news site

Article page

3. Suggesting what article to read next

4. Linking similar articles together (“You may also like”) so that the audience can find additional information without having to do more searching

Project outcome

The updated website makes it clear that the Triple-I is dedicated to providing education on a vast array of insurance topics. Within two years:

Number of users doubled from 1.2 mil to 2.5 mil
Name recognition increased: direct search (when the audience directly types the website name into the browser) has gone up from 254,212 to 417,916
Page views have gone up from 2.3 mil to 4.1 mil

However, there is still room for improvement.

Despite increase in visitors, the bounce rate remains high
Improve information architecture as users are still overwhelmed by the amount of articles the site contains
Focus on improving the search function: due to the high volume of articles, users are increasingly relying on search to find what they want