Reduce Insurance Lapses: Flood Insurance Portal Redesign

As Lead Designer (at PEAK6), I worked on a government-mandated redesign of the National Flood Services (NFS) Flood Portal. I was responsible for discovery research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design.

Flood insurance customers were losing coverage because of payment friction and no online access to their policy documents. Carriers were absorbing the cost in agent and customer service time.

Build a single account covering every user journey, or sequence delivery by impact and complexity. On a compressed timeline, we chose a phased approach, starting with the highest-impact, lowest-friction problem: online premium payments.

Prioritizing payments and claims meant document access came last, even though it was part of the government mandate. Aligning design milestones to development sprints, and meeting daily with engineers, made sure the mandate was met without sacrificing the higher-impact journeys.

I ran an online Miro workshop with subject matter experts from customer service, marketing, and operations. Together we built scenario and affinity maps to investigate service challenges, looking at what customers were feeling, thinking, and doing in each phase of their journey.

Insureds receive their renewal notice in the mail, and most paid by check or phone. The redesign let them pay online through a link on the renewal notice. Following e-commerce best practices, the flow made sure insureds:

Trust that their email address is used only for payment confirmation

Understand they'll be redirected to a third-party site to pay

Know whether their payment succeeded

Claims could be filed without a password-protected account, so the system recorded claim-specific contact details without overwriting policy information. Working with the internal security team, I defined rules for partially masking sensitive personal information (names, email addresses, and phone numbers).

An online account lets insureds download proof of flood coverage for their lender without calling an agent: email as username, visible password requirements, an unmask-password option, password reset, linking to an existing policy, downloadable declaration pages, and the top FAQs from customer service.

Met the NFIP government mandate and reduced payment lapses on policy renewals by 15%, freeing agents and customer service reps to focus on more complex issues.

Extend the remaining claim status journeys (later completed by the internal NFS team) and add a QR code to the renewal notice, which was identified as a future milestone during delivery.

Full case study: https://sites.google.com/view/port4ward/work/reduce-insurance-lapses