State Farm - Insurance Payment Center
Challenge
The way it’s always been done vs. modernizing.
Technology rapidly changes and so do standards for best practices when it comes to user experience and design. The insurance payment center had not been updated for over 6 years prior and was in need of a major relift from start to finish. Having to advocate for users with a team that has been working within the same space for decades comes with complexities but rewards.
Increase customer satisfaction score (>70% based on surveys)
Decrease customer call center call volume (300,000+ call per month ~4 min in length)
Increase payment success rate
My Role & Team
I was the UX Lead on the project leading other designers during the various phases of the project. Our design group worked directly with the product owner and engineering team while also partnering with the research team.
Research & Data
One thing State Farm had was a wealth of data to draw from and an entire research department. We had a dedicated researcher that was assigned to our group and probably did well over 20+ research studies ranging from in person moderated studies to group participatory design sessions with real policy holders. Countless surveys and heuristic evaluations were done during the entire length of the project from concept, launch and post launch. Additionally, plenty of time was dedicated to looking at competitors and documenting their workflows. Which is a lot more challenging to get considering all the various policy types, timing for payment and state specific regulations.
Pain Points
Not functional on mobile breakpoint sizes
Accessibility issues galore
Off brand with most recent brand changes
Unintuitive flows
Confusing terminology and internal jargon
Lack of information
Ideation & Process:
This project had so many phases but for this particular project, my mission was to first build trust with the product manager and stakeholders. Our UX group was newly formed at the time and there was very much a mentality of “this is how things have always been” and “why should we change them”. Being a new person coming into a group of highly knowledgeable legacy people takes time to build an understanding and how to communicate and advocate for the users.
Thinking mobile first I found very quickly was not the right approach for this group. They had to see how things looked on desktop on larger screens before navigating the conversation of limited screen real estate. Since the entire experience didn’t work on mobile I had to make many concessions for an MVP product with the narrative of tagging to get statistically significant data to help reframe the team's point of view to think more mobile first.
Laying out the information architecture really helped visualize the entire product and how it was interconnected with the rest of the site. Simple wireframes were key to help get to the core details we really needed to give to the users and what we could eliminate. Layering in the brand and design elements painted a new vision for a legacy product.
Usability testing & Analysis:
Nearly all of our testing sessions were done in person – This was a time before COVID and remote testing was used sparingly. Our team literally co-created the final product with real people and still is in place to this day (2025 at the last revision of this study). I joined countless sessions and gained so much knowledge that shaped the end product.
One theme that arrived out of testing was the need to have persistent representation of your bills. Depending on policy length, many people would forget if they even paid their bills or how much they paid for business purposes. Properly communicating simple themes like “due soon” or “automatic payments” was key to reducing call center volume for a simple question.
Reflection:
Increased customer satisfaction score to 93%
Increased payment success rates resulting in $4.1 billion in yearly transaction revenue (previously $2.7 billion)
Increased overall monthly transaction volume by ~30%
Created a cohesive omni-channel experience and improved accessibility
At such a large corporation, everything is interconnected. A simple change on the UI for paying a bill online has cascading effects to agent offices, the app, call centers and printed bills. Getting billing right is important because nothing frustrates people more than issues their money and with payments or unclear details related to changes.
After the initial launch of the MVP we saw online payments double resulting in 4 billion USD annually. During the time of the project, it was the highest trafficked page for active policy holders. Call center volume decreased for certain billing and payments related questions overall. The entire team did an amazing job creating a great experience for the users and the legacy employees became advocates for UX. Success from all angels.