Micro-dashboard serving 14M policies

“Prototyped and tested billing, dashboard, and pay flows in Figma. Used analytics, watch sessions, and usertesting.com to guide decisions. Pushed until payment felt frictionless—then tuned the design system to match.”

The Setup … Insurance is already confusing enough

The call came on a Tuesday morning that would change everything.

The customer service manager's voice was strained. "Bryan, we're drowning. Our call volume has increased 40% in the past six months, and 60% of those calls are people who can't figure out how to pay their bills online. They're looking right at their dashboard and still calling us."

I stared at my screen, pulling up the current user dashboard. Fourteen million policyholders. Hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions. And somehow, the most basic task … paying a bill … had become an exercise in digital archaeology.

Something fundamental was broken here. But what?

The insurance industry isn't sexy. But there's something beautifully honest about designing for insurance customers: if you can't make their most stressful financial moments clearer, you've failed. No clever copy or trendy interactions can hide that failure.

The Stakes: Every confused user was a person trying to protect their family. Every support call was money hemorrhaging from the business. Every abandoned payment attempt was a policy at risk of lapsing.

I had ten weeks to solve a problem that had been festering for years.

The Investigation … Following the Trail of Confusion

Day three of user interviews, and I was starting to see the pattern.

"I have three policies," said Margaret, a 54-year-old teacher from Wisconsin. "But I get four different bills. Sometimes I think I've paid everything, then I get a late notice. I just... I don't understand what I owe when."

That phrase kept echoing: "I don't understand what I owe when."

I spent the next two weeks living in our call center recordings. Hour after hour of frustrated voices describing the same fundamental disconnect: they expected one bill per policy. Instead, our system fragmented payments across policy segments, auto-renewals, and add-on coverages. Users had to mentally reconstruct their financial obligations from scattered puzzle pieces.

The data was telling one story. But the human frustration was telling another.

The analytics showed users spending an average of 4.2 minutes on the dashboard before either converting or abandoning. In insurance terms, that's an eternity. But listening to screen-recording sessions revealed what those 4.2 minutes actually contained:

Scrolling. Squinting. Calculating. Guessing.

Users weren't slow. Our interface was making them slow.

The Breakthrough Moment: I was analyzing mobile usage patterns at 11 PM when I noticed something. On mobile, 73% of users never scrolled past the first screen. But we'd buried the policy cards—the actual things they came to pay—below three rows of promotional content and navigation.

We were hiding the main course behind the appetizers.

The real revelation came during my fifteenth call center session. A user said: "I can see there are multiple 'Make a Payment' buttons, but I don't know which one pays what. So I just pick one and hope."

Hope. That's not a design strategy.

The Transformation … When Clarity Finally Clicks

The solution felt obvious once I stopped thinking like a designer and started thinking like someone trying to pay a bill at 7 AM before work.

What if, instead of asking users to decode our internal system architecture, we reorganized everything around their mental model? One policy, one payment. Everything they need to know, visible at once.

The New Logic:

• Policy cards moved to the top, always visible

• Each card showed exactly what was owed and when

• One primary "Pay Now" button per policy

• Visual hierarchy that matched urgency (overdue bills literally looked more urgent)

• Mobile-first design that worked in portrait mode without scrolling

But designing it was only half the battle.

Getting stakeholder buy-in meant navigating between the business team (who wanted to promote new products) and the engineering team (who warned about technical debt). I spent three weeks creating prototypes that proved users could find and pay their bills 67% faster while still accommodating business requirements.

The real test wasn't in the conference room … it was in production.

Week One Post-Launch: Call volume dropped 23%. Support tickets related to payment confusion decreased by 41%.

Week Four: User task completion rates increased from 34% to 78%. Average time on dashboard decreased from 4.2 minutes to 1.8 minutes—not because users were rushing, but because they could immediately see what they needed.

Week Eight: Revenue impact became clear. Faster payment flows meant fewer abandoned transactions. The business saw a 12% increase in on-time payments and a 8% reduction in policy lapses.

But the real victory was in the call center recordings.

"Oh, I see what I owe," became the most common phrase in user testing sessions. Where confusion once lived, clarity had taken root.

The Aftermath: What I Learned About Designing for the Mundane

Insurance dashboards will never trend on Dribbble. There are no delightful micro-interactions or award-winning animations. But there's something profoundly satisfying about taking someone's most stressful financial moment and making it... boring. Predictably, reassuringly boring.

The best insurance UX is invisible UX.

Fourteen million policyholders could now pay their bills without calling customer service, without guessing, without hope. They could see what they owed, pay it, and move on with their day.

That's not just good design. That's dignity.

What's Next: The micro-dashboard approach is now being scaled across other product areas. Sometimes the smallest changes create the biggest impact … not because they're clever, but because they're finally, fundamentally clear.

Design Philosophy: People don't use insurance dashboards because they want to. They use them because they have to. My job is to make that necessity as painless as possible. If I can design clarity in insurance, I can design clarity anywhere.