Life Essentials

The existing life-insurance buying journey had built up the kind of complexity that tends to develop inside a large financial-services organization. The customer experience sat on top of underwriting processes, internal systems, operational workflows, regulatory requirements and years of organizational decisions.

Before investing in a new experience, Nationwide needed to know whether rebuilding all of that internally was actually the right thing to do. I was asked to investigate the existing journey and help answer a strategic question.

That meant looking past interface usability, at the whole system it would take to deliver the product.

I audited the existing digital life-insurance buying experience and researched how customers moved through it. But the screens were only the surface. The questions that mattered were about what sat behind them.

Through research, analysis of the experience and an understanding of the operational realities behind the existing journey, I concluded that the second path was stronger.

Bestow already had much of the capability needed to deliver a modern digital life-insurance experience. Working with them offered a path to market that I believed would be faster, less expensive and stronger at launch than trying to recreate the same capability internally.

The value of the research wasn’t another list of usability issues. It helped answer a much larger question about where Nationwide should spend its time and money.

My role changed. I became the bridge between Nationwide and Bestow’s design team, working closely with them and providing design leadership and governance on Nationwide’s behalf.

I reviewed and directed the experience work so the product met Nationwide’s expectations across:

That meant balancing the speed and flexibility of an outside technology partner with the standards and responsibilities of a large, regulated financial institution.

The goal wasn’t to make Bestow’s product look like Nationwide. It was to make a Nationwide product with the advantages of Bestow’s technology, without compromising the things Nationwide needed to get right.

Nationwide Life Essentials launched in 2023 as a direct-to-consumer term-life product. Eligible customers could go through the whole thing online, get an automated underwriting decision in minutes and get covered without the medical exam many life-insurance products still need.

Life Essentials became more than a redesigned customer journey. It became a new digital distribution model for Nationwide’s term-life business. Following launch, the partnership I helped Nationwide evaluate and bring to market reported these results.

One of the easiest traps in product development is assuming that because you’ve found a problem, you should build the solution yourself. This project reinforced something I’ve carried into a lot of my work since: the right product decision isn’t always deciding what to build. Sometimes it’s deciding what not to build.

Research gave us enough understanding of the customer experience, internal processes and organizational constraints to make a more fundamental recommendation about how Nationwide should invest. Partnering let the organization move faster, avoid building everything internally and start from a stronger digital foundation.

My role then shifted from researcher and strategist to partner design lead, making sure the thing we launched still met the standards expected of Nationwide.