2024
Redefining insurance
Brolly set out to make insurance smarter and more transparent for consumers. But the early app experience felt fragmented and underpowered: users weren’t getting enough insight to return regularly. My role was to reimagine the app as a true “insurance companion”, one that provided clarity, confidence, and a reason to keep coming back.
Problem
Insurance is notoriously complex and mistrusted. Brolly’s app had three core functions — tracking policies, suggesting coverage, and helping users shop for better deals. Yet in practice, users struggled to see the value: onboarding was confusing, flows were inconsistent, and the design didn’t guide them to meaningful outcomes.
The startup needed the app not only to work, but to prove the business model: if users weren’t engaging, retention and purchases would collapse.
Discovery
User interviews and competitor analysis
Through user interviews and usage data, we uncovered a clear gap: people didn’t want to manage policies in abstract — they wanted actionable insights. Examples included:
Am I overpaying compared to others?
Do I have gaps in my coverage?
Can I switch quickly without friction?
We also saw users bouncing between screens, unsure of where to find answers. They needed a clear “home” to orient themselves.
Create
Wireframing and testing
Developing the UX through wireframes is a great way to visualise the information and patterns I have collected so far, and begin to piece together the experience and interface. The key stakeholders and myself would review the wireframes frequently until we settled on and agreeable layout. I found that discussions over rough wireframes are much more insightful, creative and useful than discussions over fully designed UI as it allows stakeholders to be more open in their feedback.
Design system
It is equally important to build a good infrastructure behind any app design. It was my priority at Brolly to build a system that would enable cohesive design across all platforms. As well as defining components this also included added new colours to our limited palette, defining our typographic scale. The extra colours would allow more variety and depth to the app, whereas the clearly defined typographic scale would allow us to create clearer hierarchies. This was all built within Sketch utilising the Symbols and Text Styles features.
Final designs
I reframed the app around a dashboard experience: a single, consistent home that surfaced insights upfront and guided users to next actions.
Key decisions:
Introduced a smart home screen that highlighted urgent issues (“Your car insurance is about to renew”) instead of burying them.
Created a gamified flow for adding policies, making onboarding more engaging.
Established a design system to unify interactions across the app, reducing cognitive load.
It is about turning complexity into clarity, and giving users a reason to open Brolly weekly, not yearly.
Here we see the Policies in a greater detail, in the previous app version you would have to click into the policy to see any information - but by displaying them as cards I can include the most vital pieces of information at a higher level. They also carry the same visual aesthetic as the home screen so we continue the familiarity across app. I also included and option to sort between expiring soonest/latest and most/least expensive.
Something new that hadn’t been explored in the previous app was the inclusion of a profile. In our desire to gamify and reward the user in a Brolly experience, I considered it vital to have somewhere in the app that would be the centrepiece of this: the profile. I placed the profile completeness bar high up and with greater prominence because the more complete a user’s profile, the better quotes that Brolly can automatically retrieve for them (and quote forms filled indirectly). The user will also see an overview of their covered assets, the green tick signifying it’s insured, the green ring signifying it is “complete”
One of the questions I posed during the redesign of the app was how do we reward users for answering questions, and particularly get them to answer questions outside of a quote form. The solution I decided upon was to a small number of easy-to-answer questions on the homescreen that would open as a popup and display immediate gratification upon answering.
Outcome
The redesign clarified Brolly’s direction: an insurance companion, not just a database. While the company was later acquired by Direct Line, the vision work helped align the team and investors around a more compelling, user-centric product.