Over the last 90 years, Nationwide has grown from a small mutual auto insurer owned by policyholders to one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world. They focus on domestic property and casualty insurance, life insurance and retirement savings, asset management, and strategic investments. Nationwide is a Fortune 100 company and an industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation.
Nationwide and the National Council on Aging (NCOA) created a partnership with the goal of increasing the financial well-being of older adults as healthcare costs continue to rise. This included creating a white label version of NCOA’s popular website, My Medicare Matters. This would allow advisors to leverage My Medicare Matters’ unbiased information and tools to guide older adults in making better Medicare decisions. Nationwide needs a portal for its financial advisors to monitor and manage client journeys as they use the Medicare website and tools and ultimately find the best plan for their needs.
The Nationwide project is being built in an Agile environment, ensuring great communication and complete transparency as the product is built in sprints. We’ve gone through a discovery process to determine the needs of Nationwide and their advisors. There have also been discussions with the product owner, the developers and myself to ensure we are all aligned on our business goals, the scope of the project, requirements, and our approach.
My role in this project is the lead UX and UI designer. In the experience, the Nationwide advisor starts off in the portal by first creating an account with basic login details, entering profile information and selecting their firm from a drop. The advisor is sent to an email to confirm they have created an account. After creating an account, the advisor’s next step is to add their first client to their portal. They can individually add one client or add a large quantity of clients by uploading an Excel file from a template NCOA provided. Upon adding a client, these clients are automatically sent an invitation to use Nationwide’s white label version of My Medicare Matters.
From there the Nationwide advisor can track the progress of their clients in their journey. The advisor can see the steps of when the client:
The advisor has no access to personal information about their client or the specific Medicare plan they chose to protect the privacy of their client.
The Nationwide Advisor Portal is currently in its' second sprint.
The product is being designed by me in Figma, a collaborative prototyping tool. It leverages the existing atomic design system of NCOA that I built, ensuring consistency of the product and the brand. By using the design system of nested components, I can rapidly take ideas from discussions and turn them into a high-fidelity vision of the product. By designing the product in a systematic way, I can make changes discussed by the team live, directly in the grooming sessions if needed for instant feedback and efficiency. It is being designed mobile first and will be responsive, ensuring advisor needs are met on any device they use.
The project is using the Atlassian suite of Confluence and Jira to collaborate, plan and track progress. On the development side, the website for the Advisor portal will be built using Material Design components for Angular. The content will be managed using StoryBlok, a headless and API-based CMS.
While this project is currently in the early stages, it has tremendous potential to help so many older adults save money and get better healthare coverage in retirement.