A failed new commission structure for Assurance IQ agents
UX Research
Design Mentorship
Background
Assurance IQ (part of Prudential Financial) helps insurance shoppers find the right insurance with the guidance of insurance agents. The most important time for the business is Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare and the management wanted to change the commission structure for the Medicare insurance agents. The reason was purely business driven. It was my job to verify if the direction chosen was likely to succeed.
My role
I was the lead UX researcher and led the strategy of the UX direction.
The management came up with new commission structure before proper UX research and wanted me to check the opinion of the agents.
My work
Initial feedback
I worked with a product designer to come up with a "realistic" scenario and a design that reflects the scenario to test with the agents, so that we could get a clear reaction to the idea. The findings indicated that the agents found the new structure hard to understand.
Synthesis document in Confluence
Future vision strategy
After a few rounds of quick-fixes for the design and user testing, the result was still similar. The agents found the new commission structure too complicated. They were too busy and had a life outside of work. The fact that they couldn't understand their payment structure was very frustrating to them and this resulted in mistrust in the company as well. Based on this feedback, I worked on a possible future vision that reflects what the agents actually wanted to learn about commission and how they thought about their work and payment.
Current vs. future state flow
I drafted the future state flow based on the actions user wants to be able to view and manage their commissions. When the flow of the current design was visualized, there were too many clicks the agents had to take to get to the information they need, which caused confusion.
Quick fixes
I also provided the product designer with quick fixes to make sure the project can move forward.
Final result
After 8 months of design are research, we tried to convince the management to either change the compensation structure or, at least, simplify the platform to allow agents to understand their compensation more quickly. Despite providing many design artifacts and research findings, the management went ahead with the new design leading to significant loss of revenue from agents who chose to work less hours as they were not motivated. Eventually, Assurance IQ was forced to close down its business in the following year due to losses stemming from this decision.
This project truly highlighted the importance of design and UX research and the value in trusting well-researched insights.