Problem
Solution
Collaborators
Pranay Kotadia, Preet Shah, Kashika Sharma (UX Efforts)
Ripul Shah, Neha Harit, Stuti Dadia (UI Efforts)
Duration
6 Months
THE SHINY HIGHLIGHTS
PRUDENTIAL, AT A GLANCE
Prudential came to us with a working website. Beautiful in Singapore. Compliant in the UK. In India, it was failing two tests:
Indian users don't browse insurance sites. They Google specific terms, "diabetes insurance," "OPD coverage," "family floater 5 lakh," "is IBS covered under critical illness." Each of those searches drove ~175,000 monthly queries. Prudential India was nowhere on page one.
When Indian families did land on the site, they bounced. Pre-engagement research showed they didn't recognize the global brand cues, and the journey was built around the assumption that users would self-serve. In India, 75.7% of decisions still start with a conversation with a doctor.
The brief became clear: build for SEO without selling out the experience, and design for trust without losing the global brand.
Before opening Figma, we put 18 Indians from different income brackets, ages, and insurance histories in the same room. The brief: don't tell us what you think you'd do, tell us what you actually did the last time you dealt with insurance.
Six themes structured the conversation:
Warm-up & Context
Lifestyle, trust patterns, digital comfort
Current Insurance Ownership
What they had, why, and what they didn't understand.
Purchase Experience
How they researched, compared, and decided
Wellness Features
Awareness and interest in preventive add-ons
Claims Process
The single most emotional moment in any insurance relationship
To validate the focus group findings, we cross-referenced three industry sources: Insurance Institute of India (Journal, Jan–Mar 2023), PwC's Health Insurance Consumer Pulse, and analyses of the Indian health-insurance customer segment landscape.
From 18 stories to 2 persona, structured along the spectrum we couldn't ignore: digital fluency. Indian insurance users don't divide cleanly by income or age, they divide by how comfortable they are doing things alone online. We mapped them on a single spectrum:
Beyond digital fluency, four buying contexts emerged, each requiring a different conversion strategy. Each persona maps to a different first-fold message on the product pillar page.
Prudential India's website serves three audiences with completely different intents, and the old IA tried to serve all three from the same navigation. Users got lost. The new sitemap separates them at the top level:
User intention and purpose : Every top-level section answers a specific user question, not a Prudential business unit
Information grouping : Related content lives together, even when it crosses internal team boundaries
Customer pathways : Multiple entry points to the same destination, because Indian users don't browse linearly
Before designing, we audited the entire Indian health-insurance category, both web and app experiences : across 8 competitors: Niva Bupa, Max Life Insurance, HDFC Ergo, Aditya Birla Capital, ACKO, ICICI Lombard, Care Health, and Care App.
We mapped them across six dimensions:
Niva Bupa and Aditya Birla had the strongest purchase journeys but weakest servicing.
HDFC Ergo and ICICI Lombard dominated SEO with content-heavy pillar pages, high traffic, high bounce.
Care Health was the only competitor with a meaningful wellness offering, and they kept it inside their app, not the website.
The audit gave us a clear picture: the category was crowded with linear forms, dense pillar pages, and clunky servicing portals. A digital experience built around emotional design + assisted journeys + integrated wellness had room to win.
Competitive benchmarking
III] The Static Website: A Game of SEO
In our early client meetings, we realised that SEO was the biggest deciding factor for an insurance brand’s success.
Acko drove traffic through non-insurance keywords like "baby boy names", high reach, low intent.
Carebus ranked with health-focused terms like "diabetes insurance."
Keywords like "OPD" and "Health Insurance" drew ~175K monthly searches each.
Most relied on long pillar pages, great for SEO, poor for UX. Users landed, scrolled twice, bounced.
Insight: Keep the SEO strength of long pages. Redesign the first four folds for the user that comes from Google.
We brought Prudential's leadership into the room, CPO, CDO, and Marketing Head, and ran a half-day workshop:
32 section variations for the product landing page, written and prototyped.
Voted on which 4 should appear in the first four folds (the part that loads above scroll).
Balanced SEO requirements (keyword density, heading hierarchy) against engagement principles (clarity, decision-support, trust signals)
A product page structure that captured user attention in the first four folds, supported SEO ranking, and gave high-intent users a fast-track to conversion, all without abandoning the dense content Google rewards.
Product Pillar Page
Static websites are read by people considering a purchase. Servicing portals are visited by people who already paid, and now need something. The two require fundamentally different design philosophies.
"Did my payment go through?" → Quick policy status check
"Something went wrong, I need help." → Raise a request, track resolution
"I need to update something." → KYC, nominee changes, policy details
The servicing portal had to handle 127 distinct items across Policy, Track Proposal, Claims, Health Management, Pending Items and Endorsements. Surfacing all of them on one screen was impossible.The clustering pattern we built:
My Policy → 4 most-used items (View Policy, Pending Items, Claims, Endorsements)
Track → Real-time status of any open request
Manage → Updates, KYC, Nominee changes
Help → Grievance redressal, branch locator, contact support
Clusters made on Figma
Most servicing portals organise by policy structure, Policy, Premium, Coverage, Endorsements, Claims , because that's how the back-end thinks. We organised by user intent, track, contact, update, claim ,because that's how the user thinks.
The result: 90% of common tasks resolved within two taps, even though the underlying database had 127 unique nodes.
Most servicing portals dump everything onto one screen and call it a dashboard. Ours opened with a single decision: what bought you here today
Two states, depending on whether the user was checking in or filing a request:
State 1 : The check-in user
Track application · Generate new quote · Schedule appointment
State 2 The action user
View & manage my policy · Request changes in policy · Raise & track claims · Health management tools.
Service Landing Page States
Claims is the moment insurance either earns its premium or loses the customer forever. The flow had to handle four scenarios, and the user couldn't be expected to know which one they were in.
We mapped every claim path into a single branching flow. The user answers a single question (If they have been hospitalised), and the system routes them:
Raise a claim home page
We mapped the flows into four contextual popups that fire based on the user's earlier answers. Each one keeps the user moving forward.
Popup 1 → Cashless claim flow starts.
Popup 2 → Register reimbursement flow starts.
Popup 3 → Cashless everywhere flow starts.
Popup 4 → Cashless intimation flow starts.
The pre/post hospitalisation flow worked differently from the others, users weren't starting fresh, they were continuing an existing claim. The desktop layout broke into three components: a progress bar, the main window, and an FAQ.
Claims are slow and documentation-heavy by nature. The flow had one job: capture the detail without losing the user.
Typical Claim flow
V] Buy Online: The two journeys experiment
My scope: Solo Designed both the journeys and led the conversational journey research
Customers who log onto the website to buy health insurance fall into two camps: those who can complete the purchase themselves, and those who need help getting through it.
DIY Customers (STP): Tech-savvy customers who prefer to complete the purchase on their own, no help from Prudential needed.
Tele-assisted Customers (NSTP): Customers who need help navigating complexities either in the interface or need help understanding the product better before buying.
Together they sit on a spectrum, from offline-only buyers we don't reach digitally, to fully self-serve users at the other end.
With the two buyer types defined, the next question was what their actual path through the site looked like, every screen, every decision, every drop-off risk.
The task flow below covers both journeys end-to-end: from landing on the site, through plan selection, underwriting, and payment.
Half the team believed an AI-guided conversational flow would convert better, friendlier, less intimidating, more human. The other half believed a clean linear form would convert better, faster, more transparent, no "where am I in this process?" anxiety.
Rather than argue, we built both. And then we tested them.
A chat-based guided journey with one critical innovation: users picked their own assistant.
The Gentle Guide.
"I know health insurance can be overwhelming. Let's take it one step at a time." Warm. Detail-oriented. Patient.The Straight Shooter.
"I'll keep it simple and to the point. Let's find the right plan and lock it in fast." Friendly. Efficient. Direct.
The hypothesis: insurance buying is emotional, and giving users control over the tone of the experience would reduce anxiety and increase completion rates, especially for the Digital Novice persona.
Some Humour in the process
The classic e-commerce purchase pattern: Quote → KYC → Health → Payment.
7 explicit steps with a persistent progress bar
"Save & Exit" available at every screen — insurance research happens over weeks, not minutes
Plan comparison surfaced at the decision moment, not buried
Designed for the Digital Native persona — knows what they want, wants out fast
Entry from product pillar
buy Online Main Screens
During the usability testing session, I served as the moderator, guiding participants through tasks using specific user interfaces. As participants completed each task, I carefully observed their behavior and actively listened to their feedback.
To assess and compare the experience of two proposed digital purchase journeys for health insurance:
• Flow 1: Standard linear form-based journey
• Flow 2: Conversational, chat-like guided journey
The goal was to identify which approach better serves diverse user needs, while uncovering opportunities for refinement or hybridisation.
Based on the findings, neither journey is universally superior. Each caters to different user mindsets. We recommend a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both models.
Conversational tone layered onto a clean, form-based design
Optional tele-assistance, triggered on-demand instead of by default
The tele-assistant's role is supportive guide, not pushy salesperso
This was the recommendation we delivered to Prudential. It scaled across both digital personas, retained the SEO and accessibility advantages of a structured form, and respected users' need for emotional support without forcing it on them.
VI] Impact in motion
The two-journeys experiment was the right call.
Building both flows resolved a debate that would have stalled in slides.
The hybrid we shipped wouldn't have existed without seeing both fail in different ways.
The C-suite workshop changed how I work with clients.
Running 32 variations through a vote turned leadership into co-designers.
They had skin in the outcome.
People don't visit insurance websites because they want to. They visit because something's at stake. Every screen has a person behind it who is, on some level, anxious.
The best decisions on Prudential weren't the cleverest. They were the ones that respected that anxiety. Ananya/Aarav, the 11pm servicing portal, "Save & Exit" everywhere. Not features. Ways of saying "we've got you."
Ashish 28
Energetic, fitness conscious, social
The Resilient Go-Getter
Struggles to balance an active lifestyle with flare-ups, conscious of appearance, finds strict routines frustrating
Flexible care strategies, motivational tracking, community support
Seema 36
Busy professional, caregiver, family woman
The Overwhelmed Multitasker
No time for frequent appointments, stress-induced flare-ups, hesitant to change diet
Simple guided routines, stress-management techniques, meal planning help
Ashish 28
Reserved, practical, stability over change
The Experinced Warrior
Feels psoriasis is a lifelong struggle, skeptical about new treatments, avoids socialising in events
Personalized coaching, discreet solutions, empathetic community engagement
Key takeaways from the Interviews
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Designing a scalable design system that keeps teams aligned across platforms and products.
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