2021
Designing an insurance experience that could scale beyond a single journey
Butter had a good-looking digital product, but the experience had to become simpler, faster and more extensible before the business could grow beyond its original insurance proposition.
Consumer Insurance
Smart Gadget
Cover
Designing an insurance experience that could scale beyond a single journey.
I worked across mobile, web and brand touchpoints to rethink how Butter could help people discover, buy, manage and claim insurance across travel, devices and emerging digital protection.
Butter had the ingredients of a modern digital insurer: a strong visual identity, a digital-first proposition and an ambition to make insurance simpler. But the experience had accumulated complexity around the moment that mattered most - getting from intent to a quote and ultimately to purchase.
The opportunity wasn't to make insurance look better. It was to make getting insured feel easier.
The problem wasn't a lack of design. It was friction at the point of conversion.
Figma Link: https://www.figma.com/design/oq1dd24WwjlDWMuOupvDrJ/Butter-UI-_-UX?node-id=914-17455&t=ppROzB6Luzf4yM8D-1
Insights from Dropout
The quote was the product's critical moment.
Working with product and marketing analytics, I focused first on the domestic insurance journey. Rather than treating the entire experience as one large redesign problem, I looked at where users were being asked to think, decide or provide information - and whether each step was earning its place in the journey.
The question became simple:
What does Butter actually need to know before it can give someone a meaningful quote?
Every additional question has a cost.
"Analytics identified the quote journey as the highest-leverage point for improving conversion, so the investigation concentrated there."
The Quote
Ask only what the quote needs.
The redesign focused on context-specific, minimum-necessary inputs. Instead of presenting insurance as a long form, the experience progressively gathered the information required to calculate and confirm cover.
Coverage, optional extras and pricing were introduced when they became relevant - rather than asking users to understand the entire insurance product upfront.
Minimum information. Maximum clarity.
“The essentiality of each input was scrutinised for super minimum cognitive friction.”
Designing for Real People
Simple doesn't mean minimal. It means understandable.
Insurance is a high-consequence purchase. A customer may be comparing cover for the first time, returning months later to check a policy, or trying to understand what happens after an incident.
The experience therefore prioritised explicit language, strong hierarchy, obvious actions and high-contrast information over interface cleverness.
The interface should not make the customer feel digitally capable. It should make them feel capable of completing the task.
Digital ability is uneven across Australia.
The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index reports that 20.6% of Australians remain excluded or highly excluded, with exclusion particularly high among people aged 75+; digital ability also remains substantially lower among older Australians.
System of Quote
Quote Flow: One journey became a reusable grammar.
Once the domestic quote experience was simplified, the underlying structure became more valuable than the individual screens.
Different insurance products needed different questions, but the fundamental interaction pattern remained consistent:
Context → Risk / need → Coverage → Details → Payment
This became the foundation for expanding Butter beyond its original proposition.
Different insurance. Same mental model.
Device Quote
Device insurance changed the questions, not the experience.
Working with product and marketing analytics, I focused first on the domestic insurance journey. Rather than treating the entire experience as one large redesign problem, I looked at where users were being asked to think, decide or provide information - and whether each step was earning its place in the journey.
The question became simple:
What does Butter actually need to know before it can give someone a meaningful quote?
Every additional question has a cost.
The System
The useful thing hiding inside the quote was a model.
Once the quote journey was simplified, a deeper structure became visible. Different insurance products would need different questions.
But customers would still move through broadly similar decisions:
Context → What is being protected? → What cover is relevant? → What changes the price or protection? → Review → Confirm
The value was no longer in the individual screens. It was in the interaction grammar underneath them.
A scalable insurance product doesn't need identical journeys. It needs recognisable behaviour across different journeys.
Different products. Familiar mental model.
The App
The quote got customers in. The app gave them somewhere to return to.
The web experience had an obvious acquisition role. The app created a different opportunity. Once someone becomes a customer, their relationship with Butter changes. They aren't constantly looking for insurance.
They occasionally need something: Check my cover, Change something, Make a claim, Get help, Buy another product.
The app was therefore structured around these tasks rather than around the organisation's internal product hierarchy.
The Phase 1 app work brought together areas including Travel Insurance, Single Item Insurance, My Covers, My Claims, Profile and Support, creating a mobile layer around both acquisition and ownership.
Update Cover
Customers don't think in policy administration.
“Update Cover” sounds simple from inside the insurance business.
But a customer doesn't necessarily think: “I need to amend my policy.”
They think: “Something has changed.”
Maybe the trip changed. Maybe the item changed. Maybe they need more protection.
The design challenge was therefore to translate a complicated policy-management operation into a sequence of understandable decisions: What can I change? What does it affect? Will my cover change? Will the price change? What happens after I confirm?
Self-service only works when the customer understands the consequences of the action.
My Covers
After purchase, customers stop shopping. They start checking.
This was one of the biggest differences between the web acquisition journey and the app. A customer with an active policy isn't exploring.
They want an answer. Am I covered? When does it expire? What did I buy? How much did I pay? Can I change it? Can I make a claim?
That changed the design of policy information. Instead of treating the policy as a document to navigate, the experience surfaced the most important information first: Status, dates, identifiers, payment, actions, claims, support, observation.
A policy shouldn't require the customer to become an insurance expert before they can understand their own cover.
Claims & Support
When something goes wrong, certainty matters more than speed.
Claims are fundamentally different from purchases. The customer may be stressed. They may not know whether they are covered. They may not know what information is needed. They may simply want to understand what happens next.
So the design goal wasn't merely: “Make the claim shorter.”
It was: Reduce uncertainty while the customer is making decisions.
The claim experience was structured around guided initiation, relevant information and clearer next steps. Support was brought closer to the policy and customer context rather than existing as a completely disconnected destination.
When something has gone wrong, customers don't need more interface. They need clear orientation.
Outcome
A product that could become more complex without making the experience more complicated.
The work started with a conversion problem. It expanded into product architecture. Then into new insurance propositions. Then into mobile. Then into policy management, claims and support.
The individual pieces were different, but they were solving the same underlying problem:
How can Butter absorb more complexity without passing that complexity on to the customer? That became the most important outcome of the work.
