Zego: The Future of Insurance

Vehicle insurance is a costly, convoluted mess. Enter Zego, the disruptor. They're slashing through the red tape, making pay-as-you-go insurance simple, affordable, and accessible.

I was part of an ambitious project to redesign the Zego experience for the on-demand insurance startup to unify its product vision and update design processes for scaling up.

Since launching in 2017, their apps have been developed in silos, split between single vehicles and fleet apps, and the experiences are sporadic and visually different.

Adding partnerships into the mix in 2018 with gig economy services like Uber, Just Eat, and Deliveroo. And the introduction of cover for scooters and vans for business, courier, and food deliveries. They faced an exponential design and engineering problem. They wanted to create a cohesive experience across their products.

We started with a deep dive into the live Zego product and an analysis of existing research findings​​ by their design team. We got our hands dirty playing with their apps, learning and documenting everything we could about the business and products.

With a remit to build a cohesive design system and solve user pain points, it wasn’t clear initially what UX problems we’d need to tackle. Thats nothing new, I’m comfortable with ambiguity.

I arranged a series of stakeholder interviews to give us a starting point and context for the road map of the business and to ask questions about their products and services. I spoke with the customer service team, and some users to unearth a series of insights.

We boiled the compliance and business requirements for the app and website user journeys down to their essential elements and mapped the information architecture and user flows for various scenarios.

Once we had sign-off on the concepts, we built wireframes and began testing these flows with the internal team and then anonymous user groups remotely. We iterated ideas and flows until we’d checked off every deliverable.

In parallel, we built the core structure of the UI design components that would go on to form the beginning of the Zego design system. This gave us the opportunity to address the consistency across the products we designed and move into high-fidelity developer-ready designs very quickly.

The quote onboarding process now caters for all customer, vehicle and policy types. The complex decision tree drives the experience in a conversational way that makes the form-filling process feel faster.

The native app flows include comprehensive designs for auth, dashboard states, process flows for topping up a preloaded balance, viewing and downloading documents, chat, and a self-help guide.

We built an atomic design system in Figma to help Zego iterate fast and scale up smoothly across different platforms. Working side by side with the Zego team, we fine-tuned the system to fit their brand while making sure it was user-friendly for engineers.

To keep the system in good shape over time, we set up some straightforward procedures and held training and design workshops to get everyone on board and comfortable with their new tools.

We worked with the data team to run some A/B tests, validating some of the core concepts of our designs. Very quickly, we found that our approach was responsible for a conversion uplift of 15%. Coupled with an efficiency gain in the product team, the numbers are impressive.

Even established design teams need help sometimes. Especially when try to scale. The pressure to keep delivering means projects like this are often left ignored. Having us own the design of the design system and user flows frees up the team for their day to day work. Once the tools are ready the team transitions to using the systems in place.